Professor Eamonn Walsh:

Yes. I referred earlier to the idea that the focus on loan impairment accounting may be a bit of a diversion. What has happened, and this frequently happens after a crisis, is that people are looking for somebody or something to blame and loan impairment accounting has been identified as something that was wrong. There has been a huge effort by international accounting standards setters, since 2008, to devise a new set of loan impairment rules. Everybody then thinks that if we solve the impairment rules, we will prevent bad things happening in the future but I am not convinced by that argument.