Sean Barrett (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome Professor FitzGerald. There is a quote that reflects a lot of what we have been talking about this morning from the IMF multi-country report published just last month on the housing recoveries in Denmark, Ireland, the Netherlands and Spain. It states:

Asset prices and other financial variables can help improve estimates of potential GDP. Most methodologies for estimating potential GDP do not incorporate information about unsustainable credit developments, housing bubbles, interest-rate movements, and other financial developments that can result in longer-term deviations of GDP from its potential trend. One way to improve estimates of potential GDP is thus to broaden the set of variables that a multivariate filter takes into account to add such additional information.

Does that not summarise a gap that we are now trying to address and, indeed, the crisis the committee was set up to investigate?