Professor Alan Ahearne:

I suppose it does but maybe it goes back to an earlier point that this was extremely popular and there were many people getting money from this. If one thinks of a property boom there are many different stakeholders who are getting a lot of money out of it, from people selling land, some professionals, the banks themselves. The property sector, if one defines it broadly, includes not only construction workers, but a huge number of people, all of whom were benefitting personally from what was going on. Then I think in a wider dimension the Government was a stakeholder in the sense that the Exchequer was taking a huge amount of money from the property bubble in the form of capital gains tax and stamp duty and all that, and was then dishing that money out left, right and centre. So it was great. It felt great at the time. People were saying, "There's something wrong here, there's a large imbalance, and there are risks and this thing could all go pear shaped". However, people just did not want to hear that.