Mr. Peter Nyberg:

A bank can operate only as long as it can fund itself, that is as long as it has money. What was happening after the US crisis was that banks everywhere in the world, but in particular those banks which were seen as doubtful - doubtful in the sense will they be able to repay what was lent to them - were being charged more for their funding or were being denied funding totally. Of course, in principle, it is possible for banks to have problems with funding even though they are perfectly okay. This is why we have central banks. The central banks can then provide funding against security and so forth. For quite some while, the Government had been told, primarily by their main advisers, that is the Central Bank and the Financial Regulator, the institutions, that the banks were fine and that they were solvent and that the only problem was international uncertainty which made it difficult for them to refinance themselves when they had to repay old loans to market participants and so forth. Several months later, when PwC made a check on the banks, it thought that, in September, they were solvent. Of course everyone knows that the economy turned out much worse than anyone expected. This weakness in the situation of the banks and the bubble in the Irish real estate market was more real and larger than anybody expected at the time, particularly, the real estate market collapsed much faster and deeper than anyone foresaw at the time.