E5 - Monetary Policy, Central Banking, and the Supply of Money and Credit
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The Liquidity Trap: Evidence from Japan
Japanese economic activity has been stagnant since the collapse of the speculative asset-price bubble in 1990, despite highly expansionary monetary policy which has brought interest rates down to record low levels. Although several reasons have been put forward to explain the sustained weakness of the Japanese economy, none is more intriguing from the viewpoint of a central bank than the possibility that monetary policy had been largely ineffective because the Japanese economy entered a Keynesian "liquidity trap." -
Interpreting Money-Supply and Interest-Rate Shocks as Monetary-Policy Shocks
In this paper two shocks are analysed using Canadian data: a money-supply shock ("M-shock") and an interest-rate shock ("R-shock"). Money-supply shocks are derived using long-run restrictions based on long-run propositions of monetary theory. Thus, an M-shock is represented by an orthogonalized innovation in the trend shared by money and prices. -
May 17, 1996
The Transmission of Monetary Policy
Text of major 1995 lecture by Bank Governor Gordon Thiessen, plus articles from Bank of Canada Review and other sources
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A Distant-Early-Warning Model of Inflation Based on M1 Disequilibria
A vector error-correction model (VECM) that forecasts inflation between the current quarter and eight quarters ahead is found to provide significant leading information about inflation. The model focusses on the effects of deviations of M1 from its long-run demand but also includes, among other things, the influence of the exchange rate, a simple measure of the output gap and past prices. -
Overnight Rate Innovations as a Measure of Monetary Policy Shocks in Vector Autoregressions
The authors examine the Bank of Canada's overnight rate as a measure of monetary policy in vector autoregression (VAR) models. Since the time series of the Bank's current measure of the overnight rate begins only in 1971, the authors splice it to day loan rate observations to obtain a sufficiently long period of data. -
From Monetary Policy Instruments to Administered Interest Rates: The Transmission Mechanism in Canada
The authors investigate interest-rate aspects of the transmission mechanism of monetary policy instruments in Canada, focussing on the stability of the relationships between some key interest rates and the instruments of monetary policy. To determine what shifts may have occurred in recent years, they describe movements in rate differentials, apply cointegration tests and estimate error-correction […] -
Monetary Policy, Uncertainty and the Presumption of Linearity
This report shows that extreme conditions and volatility in markets are much more likely to result from systematic policy errors in gauging and responding to inflationary pressures in an economy than from unfortunate random shocks. We describe a simple model that incorporates the key features of the policy control process. We use two versions of […] -
Some Implications of International Financial Integration for Canadian Public Policy
The domestic capital markets of the major industrial countries have become more closely integrated over the last two decades, a by-product of regulatory and technological change. This paper considers some of the implications of those changes for Canadian public policy. While no profound implications are found for Canadian macroeconomic policies, which probably reflects a long […] -
The Goal of Price Stability: A Review of the Issues
The basic responsibility of a central bank is to preserve the value of money—that is, to maintain stability in the general level of prices. This report pulls together the main arguments for and against price stability as the appropriate goal for monetary policy. The available evidence suggests that the benefits of price stability are many […]