Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 4 March 2015

Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis

Context Phase

Dr. Peter Bacon:

I will answer that question. The level of impairment that I estimated was not done on a loan-by-loan basis. It was done at an aggregate level. I was working from published data. Certainly, NAMA was acquiring loans from financial institutions and the level of write-downs seemed to me on average to be greater. However, one would expect when one gets into the guts of something for it to be either greater or smaller. If Deputy Higgins is asking whether I underestimated it, the answer is that I did not try to estimate it in the first place. I gave an indication at a macro level for the system as a whole of what the degree of impairment would be. Certainly, the anecdotal material, which is all I have seen, the same as Deputy Higgins, has reported that the prices paid by NAMA for loans were greater than that.