Professor Gregory Connor:

Banking crises and financial bubbles-and-busts, almost by nature, are unpredictable. The US had a terrible 2008 credit liquidity crisis. Why? It was because it was not controlling the reselling of mortgages or the leveraged packaging of mortgages. Why? It was because it had never that phenomenon causing a crisis before. It was not having a savings and loans crisis like it had 20 years earlier. It was certainly not having one of those again. It was not having a Great Depression-type crisis because that was caused by people borrowing from the banks and using it to buy shares. That had been ruled out. One always tries to prevent them. One sets in place good procedures to prevent them. It was partly bad luck that Ireland had a collection of bad policies.

Some of them were good things. For example, the fact that Ireland had growth contributed to the capital bonanza coming to Ireland. However, there were also bad policies, such as light touch regulation. The political environment also contributed.