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This issue features a summary of the Bank’s annual conference, which this year dealt with financial globalization, and three articles that present research by Bank staff on Canada’s mortgage market, the role of adverse selection in financial crises, and payment networks.

Choosing a well-designed framework for fiscal and monetary policies is a challenge for economic authorities.

More than 80 central banks use a committee to take monetary policy decisions. The composition of the committee and the structure of the meeting can affect the quality of the decision making.

This article sets out the Bank’s mandate for regulatory oversight of clearing and settlement systems, the strategy that is followed, and the key activities relevant to the conduct of oversight.

This paper explores the arguments for and against a common currency for Canada and the United States and attempts to determine whether such an arrangement would offer any significant advantages for Canada compared with the present flexible exchange rate system. The paper first reviews the theoretical arguments advanced in the economics literature in support of fixed and flexible currency arrangements. A discussion of Canada's past experience with the two exchange rate systems follows, after which there is a survey of the empirical evidence published on Canada's current and prospective suitability for some form of fixed currency arrangement with the United States. The final section of the paper examines critically a number of concerns raised about the behaviour of the current flexible exchange rate system.

Can monetary policy be used to promote financial stability? We answer this question by estimating the impact of a monetary policy shock on private-sector leverage and the likelihood of a financial crisis. Impulse responses obtained from a panel VAR model of 18 advanced countries suggest that the debt-to-GDP ratio rises in the short run following an unexpected tightening in monetary policy.

Previous studies on whether the nature of the exchange rate regime influences a country's medium-term growth performance have been based on a tripartite classification scheme that distinguishes between pegged, intermediate, and flexible exchange rate regimes.

An effective technique governments use to evaluate the desirability of different financing strategies involves stochastic simulation. This approach requires the postulation of the future dynamics of key macroeconomic variables and the use of those variables in the construction of a debt charge distribution for each individual financing strategy.

Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009, over 2,000 cryptocurrencies have been issued. We evaluate how well a cryptocurrency functions as a payment system.

The authors address empirically the implications of structural breaks in the variance-covariance matrix of inflation and import prices for changes in pass-through.