Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Thank you, Mr. Leduc and Mr. Machin, not just for your appearance but also for the openness with which you've shared information with members of Parliament and have remained transparent while you do a very difficult job in a tremendously unusual time.
I'd like to discuss the times we're in. I think all of us expected catastrophic drops in the market as soon as the governments of the world started locking down their workforces, and that did happen, albeit only briefly. In late March, markets crashed, by about a third here in Canada and roughly the same in the United States, but then they came roaring back.
That bounceback seemed to coincide with the enormous amount of money that our central banks have been printing here in Canada. It's now about $400 billion of what is effectively quantitative easing through a bond-buying program. In the United States, there's been a similarly large program of purchasing assets and an extraordinary purchase of bonds, not just government bonds but now also private bonds. In Canada, the bank is buying 10 billion dollars' worth of private sector corporate bonds.
The result is that markets are surprisingly valued. According to the CAPE or Shiller price earnings ratio, the S&P 500 this week was 28, which is extremely high. It's only been that high in the lead-up to the tech bubble bursting and in the late 1920s, in 1929, right before the great crash that led to the Great Depression.
I want to get your impressions on how our markets are valued right now and whether you think there is a bubble. If there is, how are you protecting the $409 billion over which you and your fund are the custodians?