Maybe I can try it, and Benoit can add to it.
When it comes to the difficulty that we're seeing at the moment, we were caught by the fact that our next-door neighbour was the largest trading partner of a lot of our clients. I would say that of the exporters that we have in our portfolio, which is close to 7,000 companies out of 28,000, 80% of them were exporting to the States. All of a sudden, their pipeline of sales dried up.
Some of them had already explored alternatives to that, and therefore they were lucky; or I should say they had the foresight--because a lot of these entrepreneurs are very good at what they do--to start looking at other markets: Asian markets, European markets. So those that had already established networks elsewhere than just with the States are actually doing well. I look at my portfolio and I see that the sales volume has gone down, but they've been able to compensate for a lot of it.
Over the last 10 years it was easy to do business with the States. They were there and the market was growing, and there was a lot of money flowing between the two countries. It's not that way today. What we have to do—Benoit was right—is continue to help our entrepreneurs in Canada to look at alternatives to the U.S. market. So we do. Even at BDC we have a globalization program. For our manufacturing companies, we're systematically touching base with our clients to talk about alternatives, actually, to the U.S. market. We work with them, with our consulting arm, as well as with DFAIT and EDC to try to help them with their plan to steer to other markets.
Having said this, the global economy itself is affected. I was in Asia last week. It's not only North America. In Asia, too, the volume of transaction has gone down. China, as a manufacturing country, is not as active as it was six months ago. You can sense that in Vietnam; you can sense that in Korea. Europe is also affected. You can see that there's a standard that's going down at the moment. We're going to have to face that. What we have to do, from our perspective, is support the companies and the entrepreneurs who have the foresight and the wherewithal to actually steer their company in the right direction. There's no single answer for all of them. Each one is different, depending on what they're doing, on their type of business, basically.
I think that's the difference between the States.... It's not a question that our banks were sloppy; they're not. I believe the Canadian banks are well managed and well regulated by the Canadian government. They have their appetite for risk, which may be different from what we would wish; nevertheless, they're well managed. So they're trying to compensate, but I have to say that some of the behaviour of the departing players in the financial industry also created the problem that we're facing. There was credit granting that was outside the conventional norms of financing. I've been in this business for 30 years, and this is my third recession. So there was, in my view, behaviour that was not acceptable and it created part of the problem that we're facing today.
Benoit, perhaps you want to add to my comments.