Another element is, of course, the financial turbulence and changes in credit markets that we've witnessed over the past eight months. Given the complexity of this situation, let me spend a little more time on it. To understand the cause of this turbulence, it's again useful to look back over the past five or six years.
During this period, a decline in inflation, together with an excess of global savings relative to desired investment, resulted in real interest rates that were low by historical standards. It was also a period, as I noted earlier, of strong, steady global economic expansion. In this macroeconomic setting, spreads between higher-risk and lower-risk investments declined.