Susan O'Keeffe (Labour) | Oireachtas source

I wish to dwell for a moment on some of the points Mr. Regling made in the report about what people knew, or did not know, about what was going on. He said that with hindsight we know more things and macro-financial prudence has changed.

Mr. Regling states on page 35 of his report:

... property exposure gave rise to a very risky concentration of risks within certain institutions, and even more so across the banking system. In an economy which is not large, and which has one main financial centre, it would be surprising if this state of affairs was unknown to banks, even if formal data systems did not surface it.

I just wonder what Mr. Regling was trying to say here. Was he trying to say that people actually knew what they did not say they knew, or was he saying that there was actually a crisis of solvency and that people ought to have known that, whereas we understand that people say it was a liquidity crisis, not a solvency crisis? I am not clear what Mr. Regling is driving at there.