Thank you, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Carney, and thank you, Mr. Jenkins.
Last year the difference between the Bank of Canada's prediction for the last quarter of 2008 and the actual outcome was a swing of about 4%. If in fact that kind of analysis is applied to your current predictions, we have a fairly serious issue of really not knowing where the bottom is for our economy. If you look at places like Singapore, they are down 17%; South Korea is down 21%; and Japan is down 10%. All of those economies are highly interdependent with ours.
You put the unpredictability of using all of these models, all 21 models, and then you add to that the fact that during the course of the year you've swung your assets from basically T-bills and government bills to “other” assets—whatever those are—and then you add to that the fact that you've dropped your overnight monetary rate basically down to 1%, with virtually nowhere further left to go, and yet at the same time, you argue that we have all kinds of policy instruments left to intervene.
So my overall question is, Mr. Carney, is the Bank of Canada essentially tapped out at this point?