I guess there are a couple of things. And I certainly would agree with the characterization of economists.
This time last year, when we cut our interest rate by 50 basis points, which was at the time an unusually large cut, one of the reasons we did so was that we saw a protracted U.S. slowdown. We saw that in part because we felt that the adjustment in the U.S. housing market was going to take a lot longer than others were predicting. We felt, as referenced in my earlier comments, that the issue of rebalancing global demand, once started, was going to take some time and would weigh on global growth. An easy shorthand for the rebalancing of global demand, when talking about the United States, is the need for higher personal savings in the United States; the converse is that there will be lower consumption.
So we had expected things to be slower for longer than others, and that's in part why we started cutting earlier than some other central banks. But did we see the sharp intensification of the crisis in September into October? No, we did not. It's the intensification of the crisis--there'll be history books written, lots of literature, on how it happened, why it happened, and if it could have been prevented--that has called into question certain long-standing practices in the financial system.
There is a huge range of these, but the most relevant here include the ability to finance with collateral in the markets and the degree of leverage that institutions can support in the financial system. There has been a very rapid de-leveraging as a result of both the regulated and unregulated...well, principally the unregulated at this stage, but a need for large de-leveraging in the regulated financial system, and that is intensifying the slowdown. That's a process that needs to be worked through. It's a process that can be managed to some extent, and needs to be managed to some extent, to mitigate the impact on all of our economies.
The last point on this is that there is an element where the public sector can play a role in not just easing the speed of the de-leveraging but moving into selected markets, depending on the structure of their financial system, to ensure that the flow of credit continues.