Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 21 May 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. John Hurley:

In 2006, I mean, if you go back to my original statement, I said that I thought there was a basis for action at the end of 2005 and I accept that. In hindsight, that's correct. Now, all of the actions that were being taken at the time, including by the Government on property, interest rates ... we knew the ... the regulator had already indicated at a meeting in the middle of '05 that they were going to look at the options. They were stating that they would get in touch with the banks again in relation to the quality of lending. All of that was going on. And I said earlier that it looked very much from forward indicators that in '06 things would come down. Now, that didn't happen but what did happen in '06 was we had an extraordinarily strong financial stability report where the Central Bank came out for the first time and said the fundamentals are no longer supporting the market. That's what we said. Now we didn't put a particular figure on it and there was a big debate internally as to whether we should or not. And the very strong view was that we shouldn't because we weren't sure of the extent of overvaluation.

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