Yes, thank you.
I should start off by reminding everyone that the world has changed quite a lot in the last 20 or 30 years. Household debt today is probably not easily compared to it 20 years ago simply because the financial system has become so much more flexible—almost self-serve in nature. You have the ability to control your own level of borrowing much more easily than you could in an earlier generation.
That has improved what I call the “efficiency” of the financial system. It means that households may have more debt on their balance sheet, but they may also have more assets, so they've somehow managed that in much the way we think of a firm managing it. So I don't want to distract our conversation from that, but I just want to remind everybody that we shouldn't look at something that's a certain percentage now and a percentage from 20 years ago and say, “Oh, that can't be right”, because we don't have quite that kind of assurance.
The trends that we're observing, though, are very constructive, as you mentioned. Indebtedness has at least stopped rising relative to income, which is the minimum that we would like to see. As I mentioned before, provided that the rest of our story unfolds as I described earlier, what we'll see is a period where consumers strengthen their balance sheets because they won't be leading the economic growth charge.
The adjustments we've made in the insurance space are obviously contributing to that shift in behaviour, and we wanted to make sure that there weren't any speculative elements emerging in the housing sector, in particular.
The analyses that FCAC have done on a micro level sound great. I know those folks and I'd like to see some of that, but I haven't seen it as yet.