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Economic growth and inflation in Canada in the first half of this year have been stronger than was expected in the April Monetary Policy Report.

The evolution of Canada’s trade relationship with the United States and the war in the Middle East remain the two most important risks to the outlook for inflation.

In 1995, the broad aggregate M2+ grew at an annual rate of 4.5 per cent—almost twice the rate recorded in 1994—as competition from mutual funds drew less money from personal savings deposits. An adjusted M2+ aggregate, which internalizes the effect of close substitutes such as CSBs and certain mutual funds, grew by only 3.4 per cent. Gross M1 grew by 8.2 per cent during the year, reflecting an increased demand for transactions balances as market interest rates declined and as banks offered more attractive rates of interest on corporate current account balances. The robust growth of gross M1 in the second half of 1995 suggests a moderate expansion of economic activity in the first half of 1996, while moderate growth in the broad aggregates indicates a rate of monetary expansion consistent with continued low inflation. In this annual review of the monetary aggregates, the authors also introduce a new model, based on calculated deviations of M1 from its long-run demand, which suggests that inflation should remain just below the midpoint of the inflation-control target range over the next couple of years.

Consumers’ perceptions of current inflation and their expectations for inflation over the next year have declined this quarter, although they remain higher than they were before the COVID‑19 pandemic. Perceptions of financial stress have improved. And, given recent interest rate cuts and lower inflation, fewer consumers reported reducing their spending. However, consumers expect interest rates to remain elevated, which is affecting their spending decisions. Perceptions of the labour market have weakened further, with young consumers reporting a more pronounced deterioration than others. Still, overall, job prospects are close to survey averages.

The discrete choice to adopt a financial innovation affects a household’s exposure to inflation and transactions costs. We model this adoption decision as being subject to an unobserved cost.

Overall, the outlook for economic growth and inflation in Canada is largely unchanged from that set out in the April Monetary Policy Report.

This paper shows that survey expectations can be used to uncover how households subjectively think about inflation and unemployment dynamics jointly. The commonly documented "stagflation view", namely the households' tendency to associate inflation with a worse labor market, implies amplified impacts of supply shocks and dampened ones of demand shocks.

Do bond risk premiums influence the effects of debt maturity operations? Using a model with realistic bond risk premiums, we show that maturity operations have sizable effects on expected inflation and output when the central bank passively responds to inflation and the fiscal authority weakly responds to the debt level.