Professor Alan Ahearne:

Well, the advice I heard, and the officials said this from early on, was the Minister should say nothing even publicly about discounting guaranteed bonds, and that was true right up until ... until the day the guarantee finished. I'm not even ... I'm not even talking about in the future. So if you look at statements through the summer of 2010, the Minister didn't say, "Well, we're now considering what we'll do after the guarantee." The legal advice was "Say nothing." That, that in itself, talking about discounting guaranteed bonds or even talking about discounting bonds after they came out of the guarantee while the guarantee was in place, that that may well trigger a call on the guarantee-----