Professor Gregory Connor:

We now know that this was partly the fault of the USA generating excess monetary expansion. That came out of some worries about the dotcom bubble of 1999-2000, the September 11 incident and low rates of inflation. There was a bit of a new paradigm, as is happening now. The central banks were able to create massive liquidity with low inflation and the US central bank did so. This generated a reach-for-yield. Rates fell and there was a lot of saving coming out of the emerging markets, in particular, from China. There was a wave of liquidity in the markets that was not specifically Irish.