We're going to continue on the theme addressed in your last sentence because that's the subject I wanted to raise following the conversation we had earlier, Mr. Chairman: adjusting policy.
You control a lot of policy. And you've been very generous with us today, talking about everything from the appropriateness of government intervention in the automobile field to your own experience. As we come to grips with some of the policy changes that we have to come up with over the next couple of years to avoid the problems of the past, what role do you see for the Bank of Canada?
I'll share with you an observation. It seems, as we've gone through this, that always there's somebody who was seeing the right thing. Whether it was the people who made their presentations on what Madoff was up to in New York...and there were people who saw right through Madoff, but there was nobody to talk to.
We had this absolutely Kafkaesque conversation with the people from the Dominion Bond Rating Service about how they were able to give the evaluations they did of non-bank ABCPs. It was an extraordinary experience. So there are people out there who are seeing things.
Now, you're very crucial, for us, in this whole process, because you have this point of view that allows you to see much further than most people, and much deeper. What role is the Bank of Canada going to play as we come to grips with this?
I gave a couple of examples before of what we're going to be looking at over the next couple of weeks, everything from credit cards to pensions. The subject here, of course, is the liquidity or the availability of credit. How do we make sure, with the structures we put in place, that we don't go the other way and wind up needlessly hamstringing things?
I will allow myself an opinion: that in the wake of Enron and a couple of other debacles, some of the accounting rules that were invented in the United States as sort of the wall of protection actually wound up being far worse than the malady they were put in place to remedy.
How do we avoid some of those traps? What are some of the courses that we should be on? And how can the Bank of Canada help us in that?