Professor Patrick Honohan:

Yes. I think it was a consequence of not looking at the bank risks in a quantitative way and doing the analytics on where the risks lay, concentration instead on the governance structures, which are important, but ... so they just didn't look at those kinds of numerical things until the ... in 2007 when they discovered all these crossovers. We have ... we've introduced a credit register, you have legislated for it, and the ... it's being constructed now, there's a firm doing all the software. So, over time that will build up a ... not just for the big debtors, a comprehensive picture of all of the indebtedness of borrowers of any reasonable scale. But, for the big borrowers, the ability was there to do it, they were known. That's how they did this big study in saying, let's take the five biggest property developers and let's go to the biggest banks and see how much they owe each other. That's an extraordinary ... I never saw anything like that in any other country. There's ... the lack of information. And the banks did not want there to be a credit register in this country because the big banks thought "We have a lot of information about the market, if a credit registry is created, everybody else will have that information." So, in a concentrated banking market, that's one of the evils of a concentrated banking market, is that you ... the main players don't want to reveal the information.