Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

Thank you, Mr. Cardiff, my last question on this. Just by the way in passing, you might say in a word before I ask this question or when you answer it, if, if the Minister for Finance was overruled on the issue of broad guarantee on the night, as some have, have speculated. But I want to ask you just this last question, Mr. Cardiff, that in response to Deputy Doherty, you listed really one big player after another in the financial world throughout 2008 who came looking to the Irish people for a guarantee of the banks and the financial institutions. And what happened to the brave new world of deregulated financed capital, where as Nyberg summarised it for us in his report,"the paradigm of efficient financial markets provided the intellectual basis for the assumption that [finance] markets, left essentially to themselves, would tend to be both stable and efficient", which was also underpinned by a document you're familiar with, I'm sure, Regulating Better, of 2004, which essentially said that regulation should be subordinated to competitiveness? And was the cohort, the entire cohort of public service supervisors, people like yourself at the senior level, taken in by this as much as apparently the establishment politicians were, and forgot the real nature of these institutions, which was private profit maximisation being theirraison d'être?