Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Tuesday, 6 September 2016
Committee on Budgetary Oversight
Analysis of Economic Forecasts: Central Bank of Ireland
1:00 pm
Dr. Gabriel Fagan:
I do not think I am in a position to comment on that. It is a somewhat different area of the Central Bank. What I will say is that we have made quite significant progress in measuring the activities of these firms in the past year or so. We have carried out a major data collection exercise on special purpose vehicles, covering an area of the balance sheets of these entities of perhaps €300 billion. Therefore, we are starting to try to get to grips with the measurement and with what exactly is going on in this sector. However, it is early days in terms of establishing the latter. We are working on trying to build up a very good statistical measurement of what is going on. In terms of the policy, that is an area that is outside of my narrow remit of economics.
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