Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 24 June 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. John McCarthy:
-----and, just ... sorry, if I could, just, Deputy, the assumption at the time was that, within financial markets, you had this efficiency markets hypothesis, which I think you referred to. The assumption was that markets were fully efficient, that the cost of capital was simply the policy rate plus a term premium, a liquidity premium, and so forth, and once you had the price or the cost of capital, financial intermediation then brought savers and investors together and everything was kosher. That was proved to be incorrect.