Mr. David Begg:

The only thing I'd add to what John said was that there were a lot of pressures at the time, even from the political system, about a concern that the construction sector would decline quickly. I mean, I remember one senior person in politics actually calling for, I think it was the halving of stamp duty in order, to sort, of give a boost to the construction industry at the time, you know, so, okay, the manage ... I suppose, what the bank was trying to do was to manage the situation down into what would be hopefully a soft landing, which, of course, might have happened had the international circumstances not arisen. I do think to some extent too, you know, probably people were conditioned a little bit by their beliefs. I mean, there was an extraordinary buy-in to the international orthodoxy of the time about new classical macroeconomics and efficient markets hypothesis and so on, and to go against that would have been, sort of, the equivalent of apostasy on the part of the Pope's private secretary almost, do you know what I mean?