Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 8 July 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Brian Cowen:
Well, the wholesale funding thing, the wholesale funding of banks, as you know, was something that had been arising for a couple of decades and that was seen as a good thing in terms of accessing liquidity, because you're talking about broadening and deepening capital markets, markets from all over the world being available, globalisation, all this stuff, so that was seen as a good thing because the banks were no longer traditionally relying on a deposit base only for money for loans; they were able to get money from ... directly from the markets. It would have come up first of all, I think, in relation to the Northern Rock issue. The Northern Rock situation had a very ... it had a ... a problem had arisen and they had a sort of ... a banking model that had ... related to that and we were, sort of, watching how that was working out and we, sort of, looked at the ELA aspects of that and how that had unforeseen consequences.