I think lack of confidence is a good summary given what we've been through and the fact that several times now we've had a false dawn in the global economy, including the U.S. economy, where we think the recovery is real and then it backtracks on us. It has made companies understandably cautious about putting their hard-earned money on the line into new investments. The good news is that their balance sheets are strong. They are ready to grow their business but they need the demand side to be there. We're seeing the first ingredients of that showing up in our trade data. That adds up to a lot of positives. I don't think of it at all as dead money but as ready money.
The basic analysis is that in our textbooks we talk about how a lower rate of interest will cause more investment. That, of course, assumes everything is equal, but of course in the world nothing is equal. If you ask what the expected rate of return on a dollar of new investment is today, well, it has risk associated with it. That risk is fed by things like the Ukraine-Russia crisis, the Middle East, the price of oil, the price of other commodities, and the movement in the exchange rate. All kinds of things go into that. And of course, there is just what you live through.
If you go to your board of directors today and say, “I'm ready to make this investment; I'm the CEO”, they'll say, “Wait just a minute. Let's be a little more sure before we make that commitment.”
That's the environment we're in and so the risk-adjusted rate of return is lower than it seems to us because risks are high. If risks go down, confidence will rise. As that happens, then of course we get more work from that part of our demand side.