Mr. Cormac Butler:

One rule of thumb method is to look at the assets that were sold to the National Asset Management Agency, NAMA.

Banks would not have suffered a discount of 30%, 40%, 50%, or 60% if they could have held onto and serviced the loans themselves. If a bank has assets on its balance sheet which are overvalued by 30%, 40% or 50%, one can rest assured that bank is not solvent.

There are other tests. For instance, there was an issue surrounding burning the bondholders and some of the Irish banks took American hedge funds to court. The banks told the hedge funds that they had huge losses for which the hedge funds should bear some of the burden. The hedge funds told the banks, more or less, that once the banks started declaring themselves insolvent, the hedge funds would start accepting the losses. Of course, the banks were unwilling to state they were insolvent but the fact that they attempted to burn the bondholders meant that they felt the bondholders had suffered loses. Bondholders suffering losses in a bank means that the value of the assets is below that of the liabilities and the bank is insolvent.