Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 25 June 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Professor Patrick Honohan:
Yes, we teed them up to do .. because the troika, this was one of their bad ideas. They said, ''You'll do a stress test every year'', and I said, ''This is not a good idea'', and we managed to get them to not do that. Why was it not a good idea? Because the situation had not clarified any more and if they had put a stress onto a stress and tried another stress, there would be endless amounts of Government money going in. So we managed to get them to postpone the stress test until the very end of the programme. But we were very far into it and we engaged BlackRock to do other work in, I guess, well it might have been the end of 2012, was it? Some time like that and they did some work and it was useful and interesting and valuable for us going forward. But then we said, ''No, we are not continuing with this because we are not continuing with a stress test of this type.'' And we did a different, more limited exercise at the end of 2013 and then the SSM stress test in 2014, we didn't engage BlackRock for that.
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