Dr. Michael Somers:

Well, what we used to hear was that the credit in Ireland was growing at, every year, 20%, 25%, 30% per annum. And the economics, such as I could remember them - and I suppose it was Milton Friedman stuff - was and I'm sure Senator Barrett will correct me if I'm wrong on this, that you generally expected that the monetary aggregates would grow more or less in line with nominal GNP. But here we had this fantastic situation where the Irish monetary aggregate seemed to be growing at multiples of nominal GNP, at 3%, three, sorry, three times. And we used to muse about this in the NTMA, we'd say, well, and I ... my successor actually quoted at the recent ... at some public accounts committee that he was at, he said that I used to say, "Well, either we've learned some new branch of economics and they're going to have to rewrite all the textbooks, or else there's going to be an almighty crash". Because, I couldn't see how the monetary aggregates could grow so fast. But, anyway, one day this ... this was bothering me and I got out a whole load of Central Bank reports and I went through them to see how was this credit being created. And the best I could do, because they're not, at least for me, they're not easy going, was that the Irish banks in respect of their Irish business had borrowed somewhere between €100 billion and €200 billion from outside the State, and I thought well this was a big risk area.