Finance committee  I think we want to be making sure we're doing everything we can to get a healthy economy going and introducing as many diversified sources of lending as we can. The initiatives that have been taken, such as the EDC's expansion, BDC, are all very positive in getting liquidity back

Finance committee  I think the economists and other experts in the field have made a lot of comments as to what were the causes and what weren't, so I don't think I will comment on that at this point. I am not an economist. I can only ask how we get our economy going again. As a financier, I'd ask

Finance committee  Everyone does. You're a financial services company, and as Jean-François mentioned, the commercial paper market for financial services companies declined dramatically in Canada as well as everywhere around the world. So when you're relying on short-term lending--

Finance committee  I think everybody was affected. We have taken very quick and decisive action now to obviously move away from the amount of paper we have short term, towards more long-term debt. We've built our cash reserves from what was $15 billion to now over $47 billion--

Finance committee  ---to offset this market.

Finance committee  That's Jean-François' area.

Finance committee  We actually ended up with a very good and strong profit for the capital business at the end of the year. Perhaps I can have Jean-François talk a little bit more specifically about the asset matching.

Finance committee  To your earlier point, I think--

Finance committee  To your comments, two things happen. One, if you recall with the fall of Lehman, you had total uncertainty in the overall confidence in the market. So we, along with everyone else, just experienced globally, not only in the U.S. and Canada--

Finance committee  A number of issues have contributed to it. One is our ability to access capital. As Jean-François mentioned, our access to capital through our traditional fundraising mechanisms--commercial paper markets and the asset-backed paper market--has declined considerably over the past s

Finance committee  Tax changes would certainly help. We are staying very active in the market and bringing that financing over the border, but it costs us that much more. So when we hear about cost of capital, certainly one of the additional contributors to the cost of capital is the tax implicatio

Finance committee  I'm just going to supplement that. I think it's in everyone's best interest to keep the BDC effort moving forward, as opposed to distracting it at this point. I think we're very close. I think we feel they've been learning and open to trying to build capacity and understanding th

Finance committee  Let me make one comment, and I'll turn it over to Jean-François. The first thing, and I think it's important, is that it's in our best interest as well as the market's that we have more competition. I know there's been some comment, and people might say it's great that Jeff has

Finance committee  I'd just like to comment on your point. The reason we're here, in part, is to talk about the cost of capital, and our access to capital, as a non-bank financer, has gone up dramatically. If we look at, for example, the financial companies' unsecured CP paper, we're looking at spr

Finance committee  Yes, that's correct.