(The same might be said of the property price surge that was going on in parts of Britain). At any rate, these new lending features became unsustainable in Ireland once the global financial crisis broke, with the scarcity and increased cost of wholesale funding to many banks undermining the profitability of tracker mortgages.
As I mentioned earlier, an important factor in the effectiveness of macroprudential policies is cross-border consistency. 9 Cross-border coordination in the end should boil down to coordination of macroprudential stances.