As I said, I think the best example of that was the decision to make a conditional commitment to keep interest rates low for an extended period of time with an actual specific date associated with it. We'd never had that happen before, and it did have a material impact on the thinking in financial markets.
One of the core challenges is that investment banking, brokerage, traders will respond to day-to-day changes in economic numbers, and those will change their thinking. If you start to get some good economic numbers, but you're just coming off a very bad decline, markets will start to think about the Bank of Canada moving off the sidelines and raising rates. They would have started to price in tightening earlier than the Bank of Canada actually delivered in practice, because as the economy was recovering, markets would have gotten excited about the possibility of rates rising sooner.
The conditional commitment helped to anchor short-term rates, and then by definition the anchored low short-term rates pulled down the yield curve for longer-dated maturity. For example, a conditional commitment, in my opinion, also limited the rise in five-year mortgage rates. So it provided stimulus across the entire borrowing segment.
There is a challenge here that business confidence.... There are limits to what policy can do, and Canada was hit with a massive external shock. There was nothing Canada could do about that, other than try to temper the impact on our domestic economy.