Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 13 June 2013
Public Accounts Committee
Special Report No. 72 of the Comptroller and Auditor General: Financial Regulator (Resumed)
2:50 pm
Mr. Matthew Elderfield:
That is a good question. I do not know when the next property bubble will occur. Inevitably there is a cyclical element here where there are pressures to build up and so one wants to think about the right tool kit. My colleagues on the economist side of the Central Bank talked about some tax changes to do that. I am not an expert in that. From the regulatory side they talk about a macro-prudential tool kit. Does one have the ability to slow things down when times get good? The typical way to do that is to ramp up capital charges and make it more expensive for banks to lend when times get good. We are a long way off from that. The other tool one could use is loan-to-value limits. We have visitors to the Central Bank from places such as Hong Kong and Singapore and they have quite strict loan-to-value limits as a way to cool their markets down. That is something one would want to have available.
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