Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Yes I think I said at a public accounts committee and I referred in my statement to the various places I have given evidence before, there was, there were fewer than we would have liked, even at the time I think. There were certainly a lot fewer than the Wright report would have suggested and we were as Wright said, reliant on generalists who became economists, more than he thought was appropriate, more than, looking back on it, I would think was appropriate. And certainly, you know, and when you look back, I suppose the evidence of what you think you did wrong is what you tried to change and that was one of the things we tried to change quite early on. But I don't think this was what created a crisis in any sense. Remember at the time, the bulk of the economic crisis was not ... of the economic profession was not seeing the world changing a lot differently to the way that the economists in the Department of Finance were saying. The bulk of the banking profession, who ought to have been the experts, were also not saying that things were very different. So if we had had more bankers and more economists in the Department, we wouldn't necessarily have gotten a different answer. Groupthink can apply to big as well as small.