Well, we do care about people's debt, and we care for two reasons. We're here to discuss the monetary policy report, so I'll focus on that aspect, but there's also a financial stability concern.
With respect to monetary policy, our concern is that the rates on debt, the take-up on debt, is one of the factors that obviously influence, in the case of households, residential investment, home buying, renovation, etc., and consumption. So it's indicative of the level of activity and the ease of that activity.
What you've seen is, not surprisingly—and this goes back to a previous question from Mr. Hiebert—the impact of that on economic activity and how we look through from our policy rate to the effective borrowing rate of households and businesses. What's it going to do to activity? What will it then do as part of one of many factors on inflation?
What we've seen in household debt--in borrowing costs, more specifically--in recent weeks is that fixed rate mortgage costs have gone up. That's a product of increases in the underlying funding costs of banks on a term basis, so on a fixed rate basis at five years, which is the five-year fixed rate. That's basically what we've seen: a rise in government yields since our last report--generally that's consistent with an improvement in the global economy--and a slight increase in the funding costs of banks above those government yields. So the combination of those two have raised the cost of debt--