Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 3 September 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. David Gantly:

Okay. I can recall in the ... in some of the documentation, there is a reference at a board meeting to discussing basis risk between seven and 30 days' funding so basis risk was ... you know, therefore, was discussed. The principal area where it would have come up would have been at ALCO meetings, which I was a member of. And if ... when trackers were introduced, I suppose, if you went back to '99, obviously, and the creation of the euro in the financial markets, I mean, clearly, we had come from a situation where you had the Irish market with all its, kind of, vagaries and a lot more volatility. If you went back to the '80s, you know, just currency problems and you'd get 16% and 17% interest rates. So with the euro, it wasn't written in stone but, for sure, I was asked this question and it was something I tracked myself. The ECB ... there was ... broadly, it appeared that they were running with a policy where they were running about a five basis points, in other words, 0.05%, between the ECB rate and the one-month rate, and I certainly would have been asked that question and would have reflected that, and, equally, would have pointed out that our funding was ... tended to be over 30 days so you straightaway had basis risk between the ECB rate and the one-month. The tracker products were clearly priced off the ECB rate so there was risk there and it was ... and we pointed it out.

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