oversee the UK government's 37bn share of high street banks. As the crisis continued to depress global stockmarkets, the US treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, also offered a partial confession, admitting he ought to have anticipated a meltdown in the US mortgage industry widely blamed for triggering the crisis. "I could have seen the sub-prime crisis coming earlier," he told the New York Times. He added: "I'm not saying I would have done anything differently." In prepared remarks before the House of Representatives, Greenspan, 82, who retired in 2006, called the financial crisis a "once-in-a-century credit tsunami" and said it had "turned out to be much broader than anything I could have imagined". He suggested his trust in the responsibility of banks had been misplaced: "Those of us who have looked to the self-interest of lending institutions to protect shareholders' equity (myself especially) are in a state of shocked disbelief." The congressional committee's Democratic chairman, Henry Waxman, pressed him: "You found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working?" Greenspan agreed: "That's precisely the reason I was shocked because I'd been going for 40 years or so with considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well." In an interview with the Guardian, Myners said the new oversight agency would monitor the government stakes in Royal Bank of Scotland, HBOS, and Lloyds TSB. Myners, who was chairman of Guardian Media Group, which publishes the Guardian, until he took the ministerial post three weeks ago, said