Finance committee  I'm sorry, but not the way you're postulating it: a lower deficit than the Conference Board would have forecast previously, but their forecast was way above the average before. I don't know what he's going to lower it to, but you can't imply, as I think you just did, that their

Finance committee  You don't just add--

Finance committee  We had estimates in the January 27 budget of what the economic impact would be. In our forecast, we've embedded two differences. First, we don't have the overall impact as large. Secondly, we have the timing quite a bit different. We have much less impact in 2009 and more in 2010

Finance committee  I'm happy at the drop of a hat to give a sales pitch for a single securities regulator, but I don't want to pretend that it would have stopped that problem.

Finance committee  I do applaud the approach proposed in the Hockin document. I must admit--I'll be transparent--I have baggage. One of my jobs in the late 1990s was to try to get a common securities regulator. Obviously--it goes without saying--I failed miserably. We're still at it. But at the end

Finance committee  Yes.

Finance committee  This question has come up a lot of times. Can I just take one minute and maybe explain how the government and the Parliamentary Budget Officer do this? I think there's some confusion around that.

Finance committee  Yes, but I think I just said that the government, of course, starts off by taking the average of the private sector forecast. To their credit, on January 27 they didn't believe the private sector forecast, and they actually lowered the forecast for the key factors of a nominal GD

Finance committee  I came up with the $83 billion number by taking everything in the budget as a given and substituting in my economic assumptions for the budget economic assumptions. I didn't redo anything else. It's just purely my more pessimistic take on the economy.

Finance committee  First, let me just say that I object to your characterization that EDC and BDC are being left with the questionable loans and the banks are creaming off the crop. In fact, if you look at the portfolio of BDC in particular, you will find that these are not the questionable loans;

Finance committee  My forecasts are spread over three periods. We'll have more difficulty in 2009, but there will be an economic recovery in 2010 and 2011. Then we'll have to wait a number of years to solve the problems that have been caused during the current period. The United States is forecasti

Finance committee  Because they wanted a 17-basis-point higher return. I assume they didn't do what I would have thought was appropriate risk management. But we know, through the work of Purdy Crawford and others, it took them more than a year to penetrate into that box to figure out what was in th

Finance committee  That's a question on which I recently had the opportunity to give Alan Greenspan an interview in Toronto. The United States studied high-risk mortgage loans starting in 2000 and resumed that study in 2002. However, no regulations were implemented. When I asked why, I was told tha

Finance committee  The problem is that DBRS is the only agency that evaluates these products. And their rating was quite positive. In the context of my bank's activities, I never use that as an excuse. We have more people analyzing risk than DBRS and all the other corporations combined. I think the

Finance committee  In my view, you have the choice of not touching it or charging an extremely high premium and setting capital aside. In this case, however, the premium was near zero.