Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I advised Mr. Carney that I wanted to discuss inflation with him.
I must admit, Mr. Carney, that you leave me very impressed. Your talents as a pedagogue serve you well when you explain that what Anglophones like to call
quantitative easing
quantitative easing is no more no less than the printing of bank notes throughout the world. That is just about the best and most frank explanation I have heard to date.
That being said, there does exist a platitude in economics. Inflation is caused when you have too much money and not enough goods. We are therefore going to have a lot of money and a monstrous debt to absorb. I do not want to discuss the war in Irak, but even before the current crisis, the war had already cost the U.S. Treasury more than 1,500 billion US dollars. This debt will have to be offset one way or another, as was done at the end of the Vietnam war. The inflation in the years following the Vietnam war was not foreign to the fact that the money had to be reimbursed. What better way for a government than to reimburse with bank notes of a lesser value. It makes things simpler.
I took note of your 2% target that has not changed. I also took note of what you told us earlier. The stimulus measures are going to drop off despite the fact that, according to you, nothing is decided in advance. As you say, nothing is preordained. Could you nevertheless share with us what you see, realistically, with regard to inflation. Will the rates be similar to those we experienced at the end of the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s? I would like, if you will allow me, to tie that in with an excellent initiative taken by the Conservative government — you did hear me correctly —, when the Finance Minister warned those people purchasing their first house to not be to adventuresome given that the low interest rates are somewhat of a trap. Is there a real danger that some young people who are in the process of buying their first house might get into trouble, as we saw in the early 1980s, when interest rates rose beyond 20%?