I share your concern. I will speak for myself, but in our communications last week we sought to put more emphasis on the notion that someday we're going to be back at neutral and that neutral is 2.5% to 3.5%, so that people will begin to digest that as an approaching fact. Of course, the pace is something that we have described before. It's unknown at this stage.
I have children who are adults, and I think they don't understand this, because they've never experienced the kinds of interest rates that you and I have in our lifetime. I hope they never do, because that was all about our inflation history and we worked very hard to fix it.
It was painful to fix. During the 1980s, when I was at the Bank of Canada as a young researcher, you could feel that. It was a very painful experience. That was when I bought my first house, and rates were 12% or 13%.
That goes into the rear-view mirror, and now you want people to understand that 3% would be just a normal thing, given the low inflation environment that we've established.
It shouldn't feel difficult. It shouldn't be a hard thing for people to service their debt at those kinds of interest rates. If, however, people have overextended themselves, given the low interest rates, we then have a transition issue. That is why we're putting so much emphasis on this and analyzing it so carefully and choosing our pace while we gather the data as we go through. We appreciate how difficult this is and how the economy will react.
I assure you it's top of mind—we're not losing sight of it—and I fully sympathize. We're going to be very careful about it.