Thank you and good afternoon, everyone.
We have experienced an atypical recession and the recovery has been equally atypical. The financial crisis has greatly affected many countries. After all the public investments made in a number of industrialized countries, we thought there would be a spark last summer and the private sector would take over from the public sector. We finally realized that this was not the case. The economic growth rate is still relatively low by historical standards. I think it is because we are going through a rebalancing phase.
The economic world has been in a state of euphoria over the last 10 years, perhaps even longer. Many industrialized countries are in the process of rebalancing their public finances. Governments really have spent a lot of money. We are going into a period of rebalancing. The contribution of a number of governments to the economy will become negative. We see that consumers, especially in the United States, are bringing their savings rates up while trying to bring their debt levels down. As to the rate of debt to personal disposable income, we went from 140% to 125%. So there is an improvement.
It is a similar story with the housing market as levels are extremely low. The housing market in the United States will not see increased activity overnight. As a result, the Americans are sort of in limbo and there is very little demand for credit. The SMEs are the main job creators in the United States. But there is no demand for credit right now. Even though American companies are in good financial situation, are flourishing and are making a lot of profit, they seem to be waiting because they realize demand is still very low. So the situation is of major concern for the next few years. That explains to some degree why the economic context will be slightly different over the next few years. That is because a major rebalancing act is in progress in order to ensure healthy long-term economic growth.
This environment is fraught with risks.There is public debt, the housing market could crash, currencies are highly volatile, and so on. So financial markets are very skeptical at the moment towards the global economy and the American economy. As a result, everyone is very cautious and the economic growth rates are lower than usual. They will be slightly lower than the long-term production potential of any major economy would allow for, with inflation that will remain very low for a number of years. So we run the risk of disinflation and even of deflation in some cases. So central banks must be very cautious, ours included. I think it is the end of interest rate increases in Canada. We will soon have an extended break to get an idea of what is going on and how the Canadian economy will react to the American economic downturn.
Canada has a sounder economy except for the exports that have gone down significantly. We saw that our financial system was sounder, household wealth did not decline as much during the crisis and Canadians had less debt than Americans. In short, domestic demand did very well. We have even recovered all the jobs that were lost during the recession. Incomes are fairly good. Our job market is working relatively well and the housing market did not experience a drop in prices during the recession. We have even gone back to some of the prices we had before the recession. So there are less risks but we cannot think of ourselves as a remote island. If the rest of the world or the United States are experiencing difficulties, we will also have problems in the coming quarters. It will be quite a challenge for our economy.