Mr. Marco Buti:

I will refer simply and very quickly to the macroeconomic imbalances procedure that is now available as part of the so-called six-pack. In the specific case of Ireland, four or five indicators would have flashed up in 2003 and 2004 on the scoreboard of indicators that we use to detect a macroeconomic imbalance. Those indicators might have related to housing prices, credit growth and loss of competitiveness in terms of real exchange rate developments, etc. We did not have this procedure at the time. If it had been available, we would certainly have put strong monitoring tools on Ireland and signalled the problem. Unfortunately, we did not do that because it was not part of the focus of economic monitoring under the great moderation paradigm.