financial crisis...

There were a whole bunch of us who convened in Geneva for a meeting with the then head of the World Trade Organization, the WTO, who's Pascal Lamy.

And I remember the room being quite tense.

All the sort of major banks, trade finance banks in the world were there, a number of export credit agencies and some of the multilateral development banks talking about how many of the major financial institutions supporting trade in the world were bankrupt, and how there was a huge drop in global trade, and how we were going to try to work our way out of this mess.

And at one point, Monsieur Lamy asked how much of the huge drop in trade could be attributed to a lack of finance.

And so we thought, well, let's take the lead and convene commercial banks and others to develop this data.

So how we did that and how we continue to do that is that we ask the banks around the world to enumerate all of the trade finance transactions that they've done over a period of time and to back out the number of requests that they got for trade finance transactions.

To what extent is it an actual measure of a shortfall in capital? Like you said, is it more to do with financing rejections? That comes from different reasons, right? So is it fair to say that the capital exists but is concentrated in certain transactions conducted by large multinationals?