Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 24 June 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Kevin Cardiff:

Okay, well, I've no doubt that's correct. But, no, I mean, certainly it would have been around the time that the Pricewaterhouse-Jones Lang LaSalle work was concluding that we started talking about bigger amounts of capital. But, remember, the outcome of their discussions and of the initial thoughts on NAMA were not for anyone to say that, you know, there's a ... there's suddenly a €30 billion hole here. The outcome was that we were looking at a capitalisation of the two big banks that amounted to €7 billion, with a requirement for them also to raise capital. So for the two bigger banks, we're talking about €10 billion and then ... I forget what we were talking about for Anglo. We were saying ... I think by then Anglo was going to be put on a drip feed, so it was ... it was never going to get all of the capital it might want upfront. But even into the middle of that year, I don't think anyone was talking about €10 billion for Anglo.

The ... there were two things happening at once. First of all, with the NAMA process later in 2010, the loans were being exposed and their loan qualities were being exposed in a way that wasn't known before. But, at the same time, the economy was performing worse and worse and the property values within the economy were performing worse and worse. So there was a sort of a rolling worsening on almost all fronts of the situation, which hadn't happened. I mean, it got worse and worse so if you pick any time between September '08 and, you know, the middle of 2010 or into 2011 probably, you could find you'd have a different estimation of capital requirements based on what the particular position of the economy was at that moment.

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