Mr. Simon Carswell:

I believe responsibility lay with the boards of the banks and the management of the banks in the first instance. They are ultimately responsible for what their financial institutions do. Then the Central Bank and the regulatory authorities should have seen the banks had lost the run of themselves and there were certain issues in their institutions such as limits on lending. Successive Governments were responsible to step in if there were any regulatory gaps. The role of the auditors and, as has emerged in the crisis, the rules auditors worked by, were too narrow and backward looking, rather than forward looking and pointing out risks which existed in particular institutions. Regarding when they should have shouted "Stop"-----