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The dramatic reduction in global demand, and the decline in the spot price of crude oil in the second half of last year, may have significant implications for the future supply of oil. Investments in conventional methods of extraction have been constrained, since easily accessible oil reserves are typically concentrated in countries with geopolitical uncertainty and/or state-run oil companies.

Monetary policy actions take a relatively long time to affect the economy and inflation—anywhere between 12 to 24 months. Because of this, central banks must always look ahead and must put in place today the monetary conditions that are needed to help keep the economy on a sustainable path down the road. By 'sustainable' I mean a situation where economic growth and job creation are not at risk from rising inflation.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn A. Wilkins talks about the importance of business investment to the Canadian economy and reviews the latest interest rate decision.

Understanding the size of sectoral links is crucial to predicting the impact of a crisis on the whole economy. We show that statistical learning techniques substantially outperform traditional estimation techniques when measuring large networks of these links.

The Latin American debt crises in the 1980s and the Asian crisis in the late 1990s both provided impetus for reforming the framework for restructuring sovereign debt. In the late 1980s, the Brady plan established the importance of substantive debt relief in addressing some crises.

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.

Change is the central theme of my remarks today. First, I will talk about some of the changes that have taken place at the Bank of Canada over its 70-year history. Then, I'll talk about some of the changes that are currently taking place in the global economy, as well as how we see our economy - across Canada and right here in Manitoba - adjusting to these changes.

For several decades, the prices of services have been rising more rapidly than the prices of goods in Canada and the other major industrialized countries. In 2002, this gap between the growth rates of these two components of the consumer price index (CPI) widened considerably, leading researchers to ask if this was the beginning of a trend. Analysis reveals, however, that the gap is based on short-term dynamics and that it appears to be independent of the trend in the development of the overall price level. Evidence also shows that the gap is eventually reabsorbed. The authors examine a number of potential causes for the prices of services to rise faster than those of goods. These include the more rapid pace of productivity growth in the goods sector, the greater openness of goods to foreign trade, and stronger growth in the demand for services.

The authors apply existing inflation models that have worked well in industrialized countries to Mexico, an emerging market that has recently moved to adopt an inflation-targeting framework for monetary policy. They compare the performance of these models with a mark-up model that has been used extensively to analyze inflation in Mexico.

The Risk Amplification Macro Model (RAMM) is a new nonlinear two-country dynamic model that captures rare but severe adverse shocks. The RAMM can be used to assess the financial stability implications of both domestic and foreign-originated risk scenarios.