Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 27 May 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Con Horan:
Well, the comment I have there is a quote from the chairman of the Financial Stability Board, who has a broad remit obviously across banking across the world. And I think this is one of the key problems that we faced was that simply the Basel accord completely underestimated the amount of capital that banks needed to have. If you compare 2007 with now, banks are holding probably in the region, to use his numbers, seven times more capital than they were at that time. If you can imagine the Irish banking system in 2007 or 2008 having seven times more capital at that point than it did, then the situation was obviously entirely different. So that's, that's the scale of the weaknesses in the Basel process from my perspective.
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