Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 January 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Tracker Mortgages: Allied Irish Banks

4:00 pm

Mr. Bernard Byrne:

Again, one either accepts or does not that there were effectively two discrete parts to the process that we are talking about, one was the withdrawal decision, which was made in 2008 because of what was happening in the marketplace. The other sets of decisions that were made occurred over a period of time. For example, in 2011, the forward ECB rate was at 3.5%. That was the market rate for ECB rates. It was not immediately obvious in 2011, for example. We are looking back at the history of this where a tracker product at that point in time was instantly the best product because the market was assuming that ECB rates were getting back to that level at that point in time. However, they did not; we all know that did not occur. It was not that there was a light switch moment that occurred forever and that we moved to a decade of incredibly low rates; some of those things evolved afterwards. There is a separation in terms of one decision and then the consequences played out in a different time period. It should have been thought through-----