Let me put this into the global context and then come back to the specific issue.
I think it's fair to say that in the global context, if you go back a year or a year and a half ago, many people saw that the risk spreads were very low. They seemed unsustainably low and needed to widen. I think it was recognized that there was even a possibility that this wouldn't be an entirely smooth process. But I think it's fair to say that nobody foresaw the kind of global financial turbulence we have been going through in the last 10 months. Nobody foresaw the potential for contagion from subprime mortgages into a whole broad spectrum of complex products. Nobody foresaw the contagion effects this could have in the money markets at the core of the financial system.
This has certainly precipitated a great deal of reflection, a great deal of work on what needs to be done to prevent this type of crisis from happening again. The reality is that credit cycles are not new. They're not going to go away. So we also have to be prepared to manage these situations in the future.
With respect to this specific market, as the superintendent indicated, this is not a new market. It's been around for some time. It had been working successfully. With respect to the issues around global or general market-style liquidity, this was known in the market. As the superintendent indicated, the bulk of the investors in this market were highly sophisticated and very big investors. These were contracts issued in the private sector between relatively sophisticated players, by and large.
In terms of the regulatory oversight of this, as I indicated, securities regulation is in the domain of the provincial securities commissions. This was issued in the exempt market because it was a short-term instrument with an accredited credit rating. The scope of the exempt market is something the provincial securities commissions are looking at.