That certainly contributes.
Sorry, Mr. Chair, I should speak through you.
I would say in my judgment at the margin that's certainly a factor. I think it has been noted by several of the speakers earlier that there's a serious mismatch between housing supply and housing demand. You can't blame that entirely on monetary policy, but my point again remains that when you have a relatively fixed stock of housing at a given point in time, and all of that cash is pouring into that market, it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: Prices are going up, more cash comes into that market, people buy more property and it goes up even higher. The real paradox, Mr. Chair, is that it was a housing market bubble—the U.S. subprime mortgage crisis—that caused the financial crisis, and then our response to it paradoxically is again recreating the problem that we tried to fix. I find that very perplexing.
I would say, Mr. Chair, that at the margin there are a number of factors, and the way that mortgage insurance works certainly is part of that. Again, without sounding like a broken record, I would point to the real distortions that almost zero interest rates and flooding the market with all of this cash.... We have monetary aggregates just off the charts. Money is growing like crazy. That's going to distort the economy and make housing unaffordable, Mr. Chair.