Professor Gregory Connor:

That is difficult. The ECB as an institution, which I know the committee is trying to get to attend, is sometimes overly blamed. It had a very flawed situation in that it could only provide liquidity funding and could not get involved in restructuring. That created an intolerable situation for which it had no solution. It did not offer much. It broke its charter and provided funding through ELA that was, in effect, risky funding. I put less blame on the ECB. I certainly blame business analysts and economists on our over-enthusiasm and over-confidence around banking crises that we know we did wrong. Our Financial Regulator, as I have already mentioned, was notably poor. In terms of the business community, our banking community other than the maverick banks, namely, Anglo and Nationwide, was drawn into it. While they are to blame and a lot of them knew that what they were doing involved poor business ethics, causally they were pulled in.