Finance committee  I'm not a tax expert, to start with. I think that's the idea behind it, but if you look at the current environment, it is completely changed from that. You get the funding where you can, and right now where we can get funding is across the border, not here. It's directly affectin

Finance committee  In the document we bring to your attention today, we're just saying that the Bank of England is doing interesting things and that we could inspire ourselves from their example. By buying commercial paper—ABCP paper as well as mid-term notes—directly in the market, we think the go

Finance committee  Usually you separate the world of credit into the non-investment rate and the investment rate. The investment rate, in general, is very highly.... The probability of loss is pretty low. The AAAs are the best class in terms of probability of losses in the investment-grade environm

Finance committee  No. As we mentioned in the paper, the banks in Canada are considered to be very conservative compared to the rest of the world. They are already leveraging at 16:1 or 20:1, so going to 10:1 is not aggressive. On top of that, there's not going to be much change to the real level o

Finance committee  Only industrial companies are at that level. There aren't any financial companies that can work with that type of ratio, that I know of.

Finance committee  Basically, because we are matching the maturities of our liabilities with the assets at maturity, we have to borrow constantly in order to match those maturities. That is what creates the issue of having to go to market frequently. Because the market shut down for some period of

Finance committee  I understand your question.

Finance committee  For the ABCP market, the issue is more one for the sponsor of the program, because they are the ones who need to roll the paper. It's not a GE responsibility; it's a problem for the banks that were our sponsors of the conduit. They got issues and they had to keep a high inventory

Finance committee  It's around 75 basis points.

Finance committee  Basically, we have one of the largest existing programs in the ABCP market right now. When the market shut down for new originations, a lot of our clients experienced a decrease in terms of the offering, in terms of the availability of credit on our side. The fact that this facil

Finance committee  We can see that the industry has improved and is a little more transparent than before, but we think that we can go further. As our document recommends, we want more transparency in the amounts issued, so that the market is more aware of what is happening. It is a little like the

Finance committee  The conduits we're using to issue commercial paper in the asset-backed market are sponsored by banks, but not guaranteed by banks. So they don't have a word to say in terms of credit. In fact, it's more the investors on the street that are not there to buy the paper from the cond

Finance committee  Yes. The ABCP market, the asset-backed securities market, if you include non-bank and bank paper, decreased by 55%. It was the largest market for funds in Canada, to get short-term funds for everybody, so it's important. It's $63 billion that has vanished over the last few months

Finance committee  As we mentioned earlier, they work as fast they can. We're working pretty well with them. It's new for them. They've inherited a new mandate. We are collaborating with them and they are collaborating with us. We are in the process of answering their questions. I think they are at

Finance committee  I understand your concern. The Canadian secured paper market was divided into two segments. There was the one set up by non-bank companies and there was the one using bank commercial paper, which has always performed very well. The other segment did not perform well; it has eve