That's an interesting parallel, because we had a tech bubble which we're all familiar with, especially here in Canada, and it collapsed, and very little happened. Very little happened in a macro-economic sense, but it was a much more narrowly focused bubble.
The one we're talking about in this decade was more one where leverage went everywhere. It was in the financial system, not simply in a particular sector of the stock market. Anywhere you could make a bet, you could get leverage and put it on that bet—commodity markets, housing markets, intermediaries in housing markets in the U.S. It went truly global that bubble, so the repair job is much broader and involves much more and, as you know, is requiring a whole new architecture for the financial system.
This is a substantially bigger thing than the tech bubble. Fundamentally, though, how it impacted ordinary people is not that different. The stocks went down. It had a wealth effect. It caused a little ripple in the economy. This one was really so much bigger, and it was synchronized.