Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 18 June 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. John Moran:
I think, in terms of the analysis - and again this is a sort of a purely personal view, right, I think it is only appropriate to take the sort of ... the culture at the banks together with the culture of the shareholders and the rest, right, and I don't think you can necessarily look at just what the bank management are doing without looking at what their shareholder representatives are also doing and we know very well from ... at least anecdotally in Ireland, that I think you would have seen that there was a lot of pressure on some banks, who were perhaps not growing as quickly as others, to be as good as the other guy down the street. And so the system didn't necessarily protect against that but I think you have to ... you have to look at both sides. What we did see when we started, which I can speak to more specifically, in the years 2011 and 2012, was that we found that the ability of the banks to actually underwrite loans had changed significantly from what I would have expected it to be and that the ... that became a real problem for us as we tried to get credit back into the system because they simply weren't able to look at cash-flow lending and that ... because they had relied so much on property collateral and that was certainly a big change, I think, for me in terms of what we were seeing and one that has been worked through in the last while but certainly caused problems.
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