Northern Rock and Banking Reform

I have been listening to the right hon. Gentleman's tale of woe. May I make a few corrections? First, collateralised debt obligations and collateralised mortgage obligations have been around for 30-odd years. Secondly, they have allowed a huge number of home owners in the United States to have their own home for the first time—such people possibly would not have even dreamed of that 30 or 40 years ago—through the ability to transfer risk. The issue is not the quality of the product or the characters involved in that industry, but the pricing of the products in recent years and the extent to which the activity occurred. That is a fundamentally different question.