Mr. Brian Cowen:

We were aware of the expansion of the balance sheets and the financial stability reports were referring, as I've said, to lending growth. That lending growth was, in the main, going towards economic growth. When lending growth stopped, economic growth stopped and that was, sort of, the impact, if you like ... the real impact of the financial crisis was that it cut off access to capital at a time when the economy was growing at a strong rate. But there was also ... a re-balancing would have to be done because there was a level of activity going on, construction-related activity, that wasn't sustainable. The mistake in the analysis was that that could be ... that could resolve itself through this soft landing idea, rather than the hard landing that came when the financial crisis hit. And that's, you know ... I think Regling and Watson set out in good measure a lot of the issues that were the causal factors of that.