Finance (No. 3) Bill

My hon. Friend is right, but perhaps he has missed a further element of that toxic mix. That is not the role of the rating agencies, although they played their part in bundling up sub-prime mortgages. In order to securitise them into revenue streams for companies, they had looked at the historical rate of default in the sub-prime sector in 2000, when only 5% of the market was being sold to sub-prime borrowers, not in 2005, when the figure was 47%. The effect was that many companies had security streams that were not very secure. The piece of the toxic mix that we need to introduce is the way in which hedge funds brought to bear their financial might.