Mr. Klaus Regling:

It is the job of senior management of banks, their supervisory boards, the supervisors and the Central Bank to look at these data, but it is also the job of the outside bodies such as the IMF, OECD and the Commission. I am sure alarm bells were ringing but there was not enough attention paid to this. This we noted. We do not know about the interaction of individuals; that was not our job to find out. Again, however, one has to see it against the background of the global, EU and Irish economies. People thought at the time that things were going very well. One will remember that the time was called the Great Moderation. There was good growth, a good rise in the standard of living and low inflation. We know today there were a number of factors that contributed to this and, therefore, people whose job it was to monitor and ring alarm bells were fairly quiet globally and in Europe, because the situation seemed so much under control and so good. This is not trying to make an excuse for all the things that went wrong and for senior bank managers, supervisors, central banks and so on but it tries to explain why what happened did happen. Again, it happened in many other countries, but not always to the same degree.