Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Well, I've just agreed with you, Deputy, that it was, but it wasn't clearly incomplete. Okay. If we had a sense, or, in retrospect, greater wisdom, we would have, as the Department of Finance, asked harder and pressed harder on the Financial Regulator to evidence its, its views. But it's not that there was no evidence, as I said, and I've explained why not. So, it was certainly the case ... it is certainly the case, in hindsight, that more and better information would have been desirable, not just on the night of the guarantee but even before then.

As it turns out, when the work, the initial work was done by Pricewaterhouse in the two months after, they weren't coming back with a sense of the loan books that was very very different to the one that the regulator was providing, allowing for the fact of two more or three more months of information on the property market and so forth. So I don't think it would have made a lot of difference to the decision on the night to have this more intrusive information available. It probably didn't make much difference but that doesn't mean that it oughtn't to have been available, it ought to have. So it was a failing. It was a failing mostly of the regulator, it was a failing of imagination and-----