Professor Patrick Honohan:

I think it's not just the mortgage but also small business lending, that is, I think, the big legacy issue for the economy arising from the banks. The banks themselves have challenges going ahead. They have the measured capital according to the standard measures are sufficient. That was being tested by the SSM and so on and so forth, but some of the nature of the capital, the rules about capital are changing so some of the items that are counted as capital now will not be counted in a few years' time, so they have to build their profits in order to get there to make sure that they retain that capital going forward and also they have these very low yielding tracker mortgages which are a big drag on their profitability so that it's very hard for them to build that capital. So there are a number of legacy issues to be dealt with.