Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 9 September 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Nexus Phase

Mr. Tom Browne:

Deputy, if I take you back, I think the answer is in the book itself, right. If you go to book number, Vol. 1, page 57, I think it is ... if you again go back to that table where you see the level of exceptions in 2008 over a period of February '08 to July '08 has dramatically jumped from 26% to 42%, so ... and the reason for that is ... it states there in the document that, "The percentage increase in exceptions for July is primarily due to lenders applying a 20% discount to security values." Now I presume what happened thereafter is that as asset values continued to actually collapse over the period of time, '08 onwards, every time the actual credit was going up to renewal on an annual basis, it was being highlighted as an exception because the lenders were actually applying bigger and bigger discounts to the underlying security. So, when that report was done it reflects the fact that within the bank, from probably '08 onwards, they were actually discounting the underlying value of the security, hence it shows up as an exception. When I looked at that as well, the only rationale I could come up, in terms of why that figure is such ... it's based on that the bank was, obviously, applying more and more discounts to the underlying security.

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