Mr. Tom O'Connell:

I mean, from my recollection, property prices peaked in February 2007 ... house prices here. And, you know, we were seeing a gradual fall, I guess. The stability report came out probably in November 2007, so you were seeing a sort of a gradual fall ... a fall away and it was probably an extrapolation of that but there would have been, to my knowledge, no analytical or no high-powered analysis to prove that, you know ... of the binomial possibilities, that it was going to be a soft rather than a hard landing. You could possibly extrapolate from the peak property price period in February 2007, given that up through autumn there'd been gradual falls but, you know, if something was going to hit the system, people like the buy-to-let investors and so on might've had to get out quickly, you know.