Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 18 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Sorry, I can't find ... but, basically, what was happening was that post-Lehman's, it wasn't just Lehman's but there were other things happening, but Lehman's was the ... a trigger event for a lot. If you look at in the US commercial paper market ... I've looked since at graphs of what was happening in that market and, suddenly, in a week - and most of the money is one week plus money so it couldn't happen much faster - but in a week, there is a huge shift in the amount of funds being lent in that market. At the same time, in the UK interbank market, there is a significant shift in how much money is available between banks. There are ... and this is a global phenomenon, the willingness of banks to lend to each other changed quite literally overnight. And our banks were more, as the Senator was just saying, were more exposed to this kind of wholesale funding than many other people and, indeed, more exposed to the US than others because, you know, English speaking and we know the language and we know the place, so they tended to fish in that pool. So when that market closed down and other interbank lending starts to get much more restricted and, suddenly, people were saying, "Well, you know, we'll lend you overnight or whatever", and then, on the night itself, the bank people - and they brought with them market knowledge which was useful - they were saying actually some solid lenders, some people who had regularly been their clients and their lenders were saying, "No quote for Ireland", not just no quote for Anglo or INBS but nothing for Ireland. So, in that sense, things that had been on a, sort of, gradual tightening path over a long time, that gradualness just evaporated and suddenly you'd a fall off a cliff in a very short time. Now someone else we have to give you the numbers for all those, but that was the sense of it. That was what we felt what was happening.

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