And I would say even if you consider our forward guidance we put in place in march, the committee indicated that even after we think the time has come to raise rates, that we think it will be some considerable time before we move them back to historically normal levels, and that reflects -- well, different people have different views, but to my mind, it in part reflects the fact that headwinds holding back the recovery do continue. Productivity growth has been slow, and of course, we need to be cautious to make sure that the economy continues to recover.
Even when the economy gets back on track, it doesn't mean that these headwinds will have completely disappeared. And in addition to that, productivity growth is rather low. At least that may not be a permanent state of affairs, but it's certainly something that we have seen in the aftermath. We'll -- we've seen it during most of the recovery. That's a factor that I think is suppressing business investment and will work for some time to hold interest rates down. These concerns and these factors are related to what economists are discussing, including secular stagnation. The committee -- you know, when it thinks about what is normal in the longer run, the committee has recently slightly reduced their estimates of what will be normal in the longer run. It -- the median view on that is now something around 3 and 3 1/4 percent, but we don't really know. But it's the same -- the same factors that are making the committee feel that it will be appropriate to raise rates only gradually, they're some of the same factors that figure in the secular stagnation.