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To complement its existing set of tools to analyze and forecast developments in the global economy, the Bank of Canada recently developed a version of the Global Projection Model (GPM) jointly with staff at the International Monetary Fund.

As a native Montrealer, I am particularly pleased to be coming home to deliver my first speech as Senior Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada.

There is an old saying, “Knowledge is gained from experience, and experience is gained from mistakes.” In Canada, we made our mistakes early and often in the 1970s and 1980s. Our fiscal situation deteriorated sharply, inflation surged to double-digit levels, and a few small regional banks collapsed.

The Bank of Canada’s annual conference, held in November 2011, brought together leading researchers from universities, central banks and other institutions from around the world. Divided into four sessions plus two keynote addresses, the conference covered such topics as the use of cash and other means of payment in retail transactions, large-value payments systems, and […]

Deputy Governor Lynn Patterson discusses the efforts in multiple jurisdictions to strengthen LIBOR and similar benchmarks and work underway in Canada to consider a new risk-free benchmark for the Canadian dollar market.

Using Bank Note Distribution System data on the demand for cash up to September 2020, we find that demand was strong. This is true even though cash use for payments declined early in the pandemic. When mobility restrictions and lockdown measures were eased, cash use for payments increased sharply but remained less popular than electronic methods of payment.

We have seen a remarkable continuation of robust global growth, fuelled by increases in international trade and facilitated by the continuing evolution and expansion of capital markets. Domestic demand began to grow more strongly in Europe and Asia and to slow in the United States, and this began to ease some of the concerns related to global imbalances that I spoke about during my last visit.

In this article, author Charles Spencer reviews the complex process of developing the new series, which represents a dramatic change for Canada. The leading-edge security features made possible by the new substrate, the cost savings of the move to a polymer base and the environmental advantages of the new notes are also examined.

This article summarizes the proceedings of a conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in May 1998. This was the second Bank conference to focus directly on issues concerning financial markets. The topic for 1998—the extraction of information from the prices of financial assets—has been an area of extensive research by central banks worldwide because of its connection to monetary policy. The Bank wanted to encourage such work by Canadian researchers as well as solicit feedback on work conducted internally. It also wanted to broaden the understanding of the interplay in the markets between central banks and other participants. It therefore assembled a wide mix of researchers, central bankers, and market participants. The summary briefly outlines the papers presented as well as the wrap-up discussion.

Economists in the nineteenth century spent considerable time discussing the merits of a free-banking system, in which each commercial bank would be able to issue its own notes and deposits, subject to a convertibility requirement backed by its own gold reserves. Such a system, the proponents argued, would be able to deliver price-level stability yet be flexible enough to withstand the vicissitudes of the business cycle. Moreover, there would be no need for central banks. While this idea has received less attention in recent years, some economists still put it forward as a practical alternative to the current system. Laidler suggests that the centralizing tendencies in banking would inevitably undermine competition within a free-banking system, and lead to the natural emergence of one dominant bank. Other developments in the twentieth century, most notably the demise of the gold standard and widespread agreement that governments should play a determining role in setting monetary policy goals, have also limited the practicality of such a system. Laidler examines the Bank of Canada's history from the free-banking perspective and concludes that the current system of inflation targeting provides a much better anchor for orderly price-level behaviour than the free-banking system's convertibility could ever guarantee.