Dr. Dan McLaughlin:

It was just another view. I mean, as I said before, to go back and pick out papers that were written ten or 15 years ago, you can pick out papers that were written ten or 15 years ago that were wrong all the time, so it's just another view. I'm looking at something, I ... the notion that nobody thought that, everybody thought the housing market would go on forever, is completely wrong. It's absolutely, completely wrong. Of course, not many people thought it would collapse the way it did but in January 2007, I'm even looking at something I wrote myself, "the most likely outturn for the market is therefore a period of flat or only modest price growth ... until affordability is restored" - that's January 2007. So the notion that everyone was saying it was going to go up 10% per annum is just not true. The other thing I would point out is the major losses for the Irish banks were not in residential property, they were in commercial property ... in commercial property. Not many people, if I recall, wrote anything about commercial property, and that was what caused the damage for Irish banks' profitability and caused them to require significant capital inflow ... injection from the State, not residential property.