As I recently stated elsewhere, “many of the risks that crystallised in the past year were on our radar screen long before the crisis started.” 8 Over the past years, excessive risk tolerance, hazardous risk transfer mechanisms and possible shortcomings of the originateto-distribute model were time and again analysed in Financial Stability Reports – including our own Overview of Financial Stability.
In his 2011 Whitaker Lecture, Cormac O’Grada identified five crisis episodes in Ireland: the Economic War of 1934-1938; the Emergency (World War Two); the lost decade of the 1950s; the 1980s fiscal crisis; and the most recent crisis that ignited in 2008 (O’Grada 2011).