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Conditions in the international financial system have improved considerably since June in response to the forceful actions taken by policy-makers around the world.

FSR Highlights - December 2009

The global economy has shown greater strength than was anticipated at the time of the November Report.

Three major interrelated global developments are having a profound impact on the Canadian economy and making the outlook more uncertain than it was at the time of the July Monetary Policy Report Update.

Canadian economic activity is evolving largely as expected. Inflation is now near the middle of the Bank of Canada’s control range of 1% to 3%.

The level of government debt in Canada relative to gross domestic product has risen steadily since the mid-1970s. Canada has not been alone in experiencing rising government indebtedness, but in comparison to other countries, Canada's debt load is now distinctly on the high side. The author reviews some of the effects of rising government debt levels on macroeconomic performance and provides some calculations aimed at illustrating their possible long-run impact on the Canadian economy. His analysis, which is based on a model of the Canadian economy used at the Bank of Canada, suggests that higher levels of government debt reduce both the level of output and the share of output that is available for domestic consumption. The central policy implication is that there are substantial benefits to halting the rise in government debt and thus preventing further erosion of consumption opportunities.

The three articles in this issue provide an overview of the monetary policy decision-making process at the Bank of Canada, a discussion of Bank research on the assessment of vulnerabilities in the financial system and a description of recent fragmentation in Canadian equity markets.

Schembri studies Canada's post-World War II experience in introducing a floating exchange rate, including its effects on the Canadian economy and its influence on the development of macroeconomic theory. In particular, Canada's flexible exchange rate and high degree of capital mobility with the United States provided an unprecedented experiment for macroeconomic policy. The successes and difficulties encountered by Canadian authorities in managing monetary and fiscal policy under this regime drew the interest of researchers at the International Monetary Fund and elsewhere and had a significant impact on the development of the Mundell-Fleming model, the path-breaking innovation in modern open-economy macroeconomics.

This paper combines loan-level administrative data with household-level survey data to analyze the impact of recent macroprudential policy changes in Canada using a microsimulation model of mortgage demand of first-time homebuyers.

The issue addressed in this article is the extent to which monetary policy in Canada should respond to asset-price bubbles. The article concludes that maintaining low and stable consumer price inflation is the best contribution that monetary policy can make to promoting economic and financial stability, even when the economy experiences asset-price bubbles. In extreme circumstances—when an asset-price bubble is well identified and likely to have significant costs to the economy when it bursts—monetary policy might better maintain low and stable consumer price inflation by leaning against a particular bubble even though it may mean that inflation deviates temporarily from its target. Such a strategy might reduce the risk that a crash in asset prices could lead to a recession and to inflation markedly below target in the longer run. The circumstances where this strategy is possible will be rare because economists are far from being able to determine consistently and reliably when leaning against a particular bubble is likely to do more harm than good. Housing-price bubbles should be a greater concern for Canadian monetary policy than equity-price bubbles, since rising housing prices are more likely to reflect excessively easy domestic credit conditions than are equity prices, which are largely determined in global markets.

In this paper, we argue that differences in the cost structures across sectors play an important role in firms’ decisions to adjust their prices. We develop a menu-cost model of pricing in which retail firms intermediate trade between producers and consumers.