Professor Philip Lane:

This is me looking at the fact that they did not do it. There may be a couple of lines in the Honohan report to this effect as well, that they were reluctant to pursue it. As someone said earlier, the fact that emergency liquidity assistance was used big-time later on reveals that if one makes the case for it, it can happen. I do not know the individuals involved. In the euro system, the ECB is the central bank for all member countries. We could ask if our national Central Bank had been able to step in at that time, what would we have done? If there had been a funding problem at home, the national Central Bank would have stepped in and provided substantial liquidity to the local banks, but a national central bank cannot provide foreign currency liquidity. To the extent that these were funding from overseas, there would have been a problem.