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their balance sheets.
    In the early part of the twenty-first century, one bank in the marketplace had developed a very simple process for evaluating risk. Business plans and individual projects could be evaluated and credit approvals granted in the shortest turnaround time for an approval in the marketplace – twenty-four hours. This organisation was Anglo Irish Bank.
    It was not lost on Anglo Irish Bank that the speed of a bank’s decision making often influenced the borrower’s choice of bank. The principle behind Anglo’s method was that the lender knew their customers, the customers were trustworthy and they understood their business better than the bank (while the bank presumably understood banking better than its customers). Each individual project wasconsidered on a stand-alone basis. A new project in Dublin 4 was not deemed to have any relevance to a project that the same borrower might have started some twelve months earlier in Galway or Cork. If the borrower provided a personal guarantee then there would be no need for cross guarantees from other companies within the borrower’s portfolio. The concept of the customer knowing his business better than the lender has been quickly dispelled by recent experiences. In many ways this was equivalent to self-certification.
    This process of credit analysis was not adopted by the two big banks in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Based on the assumption that all banks carried out the same analysis on any given property loan, debates raged within credit committees as to how Anglo could turn around a decision within twenty-four hours while the two big banks with all guns firing were taking anything from ten days to a month. In around 2004, the big banks changed their attitude and moved towards a more lax analysis and decision-making culture. The pressure to close the gap between the EPS (earnings per share) annual growth rate of the two big banks and that of Anglo Irish Bank was a major influencing factor in the growth of the commercial and developmental loan portfolios. In Figure 1 (see Appendix ) one can see the accelerated growth from 2004 to 2009 of lending to the private sector by the Irish banks as a percentage of GNP. The growth in this period was over 100 per cent.
    The first ever US billion dollar loan in the euromarkets was syndicated in February 1982 for the Kingdom ofDenmark. I was fortunate to have won the mandate for Citigroup in London as vice-president responsible for arranging the transaction. I can recall clearly how many of my international colleagues hailed this transaction as a milestone in the European markets. This debt raising concluded in New York with 113 participants in a syndicate where contributions ranged from US$5 million to US$50 million each. The deal was an unqualified success but it had its challenges. Mr Erling Christensen, permanent secretary for the Danish Ministry of Finance, joined me on an investor tour of the US to present the economic background and outlook for Denmark. Many small banks in the US had never before considered lending money to European sovereigns. Caution prevailed in all the banks, as evidenced by the number of participants; seventy to eighty of the banks lent only $5 to $10 million each. Groups of interested banks attended presentations in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta and Charlotte, North Carolina. What we managed to do for the Kingdom of Denmark was to open up a totally new market of investors for sovereign debt.
    What was deemed to be a milestone in borrowing for a major European state, some twenty-five years later became normal practice in Ireland for property developers. In most other countries commercial property loans would not be made without full disclosure of the borrower’s financial position, including contingent liabilities. It should be made clear that in the 1980s, whether a sovereign or corporate borrower went to the markets to raise debt, full disclosure of their total