The 1970s film Three Days of the Condor offers Finance Minister Brian Lenihan lessons as he bets the farm on NAMA.

I’ve always loved the final scene where Joe Turner, the CIA agent on the run played by Robert Redford, tells shady CIA boss J.Higgins (Cliff Robertson) that he has spilled the beans on a proposed U.S. led invasion of the Middle East to The New York Times.

"JOE TURNER: Well, go on home, Higgins. Go on. They’ve got it.

J. HIGGINS: What?

TURNER: You know where we are. Just look around. That’s where they ship from. They’ve got all of it.

[Higgins sees that as they've walked they have reached the front of the New York Times printing plant.]

HIGGINS: What? What did you do?

TURNER: I told them a story. You play games. I told them a story.

HIGGINS: Oh, you…you poor dumb son of a bitch. You’ve done more damage than you know.

TURNER: I hope so.

HIGGINS: You’re about to be a very lonely man. It didn’t have to end this way.

TURNER: Of course it did.

HIGGINS: Hey, Turner. How do you know they’ll print it? You can take a walk, but how far if they don’t print it?

TURNER: They’ll print it.

HIGGINS: How do you know?"

The film closes on a freeze frame of Turner’s anxious and paranoid face as Higgins asks “How do you know?”

The Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan, in his approach to the National Asset Management Agency (NAMA), would do well to heed the lesson of this scene: It is impossible to predict the future.

Lenihan is telling us to trust him regarding the valuation of the development loans that are to be transferred from our damaged banks to NAMA.  A reecnt article in The Irish Times signed by a group of 46 economists, asks the government to reconsider NAMA.  It questions the minister’s proposed valuation approach which it describes as “taking the market price as a basis and then adjusting upwards to ‘fair economic value’. This concept works on the assumption that in the short term, property and development prices will rise.”

Well Brian… How do you know?

By Dara Lawlor

Dara Lawlor is a management consultant and freelance journalist. He blogs here.