Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 10 September 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Marco Buti:
I mean, what I can say on this is that the blanket guarantee was decided and it was based at the time - I mean, in understandably very difficult conditions - on a misdiagnosis of what the state of the banks were. I mean, the bank ... as I indicated before, you can have a blanket guarantee only if you think that the problem is one of liquidity, not of solvency. And it became clear quite quickly that there was a problem of solvency, not of liquidity. So that's where we stood at the time. I do not want to, let's say, venture into, let's say, counterfactual at this stage and, in particular, not on action that the ECB could have made. I am here representing the Commission, not the ECB.
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