Mr. Brian Cowen:

-----there was ... well, just to be ... to be rounded about it and to be straight about it, I'm not trying to have an argument with you about it. The crisis management that was ongoing, and it's ... a trigger moment happened in September ... that's the sort of way it's been described by people who were there as well, like ... people like Kevin Cardiff. It wasn't just you were managing a tightening situation. The whole thing ... the nature of the problem changed completely because Lehman's - which is not a big bank in US terms, certainly not a big bank in global terms - what had they had ... what had happened there at that bank had brought about a situation where, you know, the government, the US Government, were practically pleading with Congress, on the same night that we were meeting, to give them something like $600 billion or $700 billion to throw at the problem because they didn't know where it was going to end up. That's what ... that's ... and when you're asking me what the plan ... the plan was in place that we were ... all of the work had been done. We had a nationalisation Bill ready to go, if that's what we wanted to do. We had made arrangements to have a fighting fund established, if that's what we needed to do. We had legislation ready to go, if we were going some, sort of, a guarantee route. That was ready, you know, so, in fairness, an awful lot of contingency work was done.