Mr. Ajai Chopra:

Deputy, I have been, as I said earlier, very fulsome in my written statement. If you want I can sort of walk you through that but the key point is that the IMF staff viewed certain ... was of the view that imposing losses on just junior bondholders was not sufficient and that the issue of imposing losses on senior, unguaranteed, unsecured bondholders should also be explored and I listed criteria for this, which is: look at the overall magnitude of banks' losses, to look at the issue of returning the banks to a more stable funding structure and also to look at the issue of potential knock-on effects on others. And as I said in the statement, this needs to be done within a robust legal and institutional framework that strikes a reasonable balance between creditor safeguards and flexibility.

The key issue became the issue of contagion. Again, as I said in my statement, this was ... this was ... in ... this was obviously something that needed to be taken into account. European institutions put an enormous weight on this ... on the issue of contagion and they were very concerned that moving on imposing losses on senior bondholders in Ireland would adversely affect euro area banks and their funding markets. The view of the IMF staff was, this does need to be taken into account but that this was something that was anticipated by markets and if it was done within the context of a programme where the sovereign has already lost access to markets, it is something that the markets should have been able to absorb and even if they were not able to absorb it, there were mechanisms to help address that contagion.