Mr. Peter Nyberg:

The problem with evaluating financial assets is that almost everything has to do with expectations - what one expects an asset to be worth in a certain period of time. That means that all changes in expectations have an immediate effect on the assets. It is not a fact that as the economy changes or employment goes down that the assets gradually adapt to that. As soon as something happens, the assets go down, or up as the case may be. What happened quite early in 2009 was that the assumptions underlying the guarantee decision that all banks were solvent, and that their liquidity problems were temporary, had changed. The change was partly because Anglo was nationalised. That was a sign that things were not as good as before. Also, of course, the economic situation outside Ireland deteriorated, and it deteriorated within Ireland as well. All that had effects on the banks and the banks' assets. The effect was immediate, not over some period. It always happens, so it does not surprise me. As soon as a bank is exposed to the real estate market, and as soon as there is an assumption that the real estate market is really going down, the bank's assets must be written down.