Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 21 January 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Mr. Klaus Regling:

As I said before, in my view, and this is I think reflected in the report, all these elements contributed. This includes the European element and we wrote about that in the report. At the beginning of monetary union this move to permanently low interest rates meant a monetary push. We knew about it but we did not anticipate the full extent of the problems. We were in favour in the EU as a whole of more financial market integration but we underestimated the consequences because it could mean - as we see in Ireland and some other countries - that it allowed banks to access funding from abroad and fuel the bubble. There was nobody who told the national supervisors to do something against that. All that has been changed, but these are indeed problems that came from the European level and they added to the problems that came from the global level and the home-made failures in governance in many areas.