Industry committee  Certain sectors, without a doubt, are having a difficult time, but these are counterbalanced at an aggregate level, at least up to now, by some very strong positives in other regions and in other sectors.

Industry committee  Well, these are real and persistent forces, it appears, and they do represent--

Industry committee  They do represent something that appears to persist that is a positive for many regions. And given our single policy instrument of interest rates, our mission is to operate at a very aggregate level and see how these negatives and positives balance out as we look ahead. It is wit

Industry committee  We pay attention to productivity because of course that plays an important determining role in the potential of the economy, how fast we can grow on a sustainable basis. It's also the source of most of the economic progress or material gain that we experience. As we're more produ

Industry committee  Again, just very briefly, your final question or questions really ventured more into fiscal policy than monetary policy, and we usually don't comment on that. We take that as given. Our mission in monetary policy, as Paul mentioned at our last meeting, is really twofold, but it

Industry committee  I don't have much to add, but I'll add a little. As Paul indicated, it's hard to know where the exchange rate quote should be, but certainly there are forces that you can identify that can explain the appreciation we've seen, certainly the direction of movement over the last fou

Industry committee  It will be brief, just two short things trading on Paul's comments. First, we do anticipate some easing in the growth of even the Asian economies because we don't think they will be able to completely decouple from the United States. The United States is just too important a tra

Industry committee  Very briefly, as Paul indicated, the normal daily flow through the Canadian foreign exchange market runs in the billions of dollars. So it takes a very large transaction to have an influence on those, and sometimes a large merger or acquisition could have such an influence. The i

Industry committee  I'm not sure I follow the question exactly, so I hesitate to give an answer, but one point that might be worth making is that there are difficult as well as very positive periods, and you rely on some diversification to get you through. One of the advantages of all of the foreign

Industry committee  Sure. I'll be brief. There is a vast amount of money circulating through the world economy, of course, and right now, unfortunately, we happen to be going through a very challenging time. There have been some losses, but you wouldn't want to leave with the sense that everyone's

Industry committee  I'll be very brief. Just to add a footnote to what Paul said, we don't expect the situation in the U.S. housing sector to normalize until the latter part of 2009. That's not to say, though, that we don't see the U.S. economy beginning to turn through 2008 because of the strengt