I can start.
I think that, in what we're observing, it's important to realize that what we're seeing in the United States really starts with very idiosyncratic factors and conditions affecting specific banks. We're talking about a banking system with 7,000 banks. It's not the same type of management that we have here, in a system that has seven major banks or financial institutions.
There were regulatory gaps that were obviously the effect of very fast-rising interest rates and some troubles in managing that risk in certain banks' balance sheets, obviously combined with an electronic bank run, which goes much faster, as we've discovered, than those long wait lines. All those factors, I think, combine to produce what we're seeing. Then there's the confidence aspect, which produces fragilities elsewhere.
In the case of Canada, our system has been, I think, consistently demonstrated to be resilient. That was the case even in 2008-09, which was orders of magnitude more complicated and featured credit issues and toxic assets, and our financial system ended up being quite resilient. We ended up importing the negative effects on our economy, but our banks were sound. If anything, they have been reinforced by very tight and sound regulation since then.
I'm not concerned that we might see something like this in Canada; however, what's going on certainly means that credit is going to be slowing down further. It was already slowing down in the U.S. It's going to slow further. We might see that as well in Canada as we see a bit of prudence on the part of certain financial institutions, so it reinforces the idea that we are going to see a recession as a result.