Mr. John McCarthy:

No, not on the economic side, Senator. The reason for that is that we would engage - when I talk about "we" I am talking about the economic division - we would engage with the Central Bank on an informal basis and the nuts and bolts of our discussion would essentially be about the short-term outlook for the economy. We would, sort of, exchange views on where things were going. There were a lot more people employed in the bank, so you could argue maybe there was a comparative advantage there but we would have informal discussions pretty much around the Central Bank's quarterly bulletin, we would discuss where things were going. We might often, or from time to time, we might run some technical issues past the economic division of the bank, but this was purely in the macro-economic space.

So, the whole rationale was to ... you know, if the bank were talking about a forecast of, we'll say, X%, we would say, "Well, what's the savings rate that underpins your consumption figure? What's the exchange rate that underpins your export?" It was purely a technical discussion. We did not have, in the economic side, any dealings with the Financial Regulator.