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While monetary stability through low inflation is crucial to good economic performance, our economy cannot function properly unless it is also supported by an efficient and stable financial system. And as the world economy becomes increasingly interconnected, sound macroeconomic policies and sound financial systems across all countries are even more essential.

In Toward More Resilient Markets: Over-the-Counter Derivatives Reform in Canada, Michael Mueller and André Usche show that the implementation of derivatives market reforms in Canada is well under way and has lessened vulnerabilities. But accompanying changes to market structure have both positive and negative effects that require ongoing attention from authorities.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn A. Wilkins discusses developments in the Canadian labour market and factors that may help explain why wage growth is slower than expected.

International financial institutions, such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the Bank for International Settlements, are important players in the global financial system. This article provides an overview of the major international financial institutions to which Canada belongs. The paper highlights their activities and the nature of Canada's involvement, including that of the Bank of Canada. Recent initiatives coming out of the Halifax and Lyon Summits to improve the effectiveness of international financial institutions are also noted.

Deputy Governor Jean Boivin discusses aging in Canada and its impact on our economy.

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 article describes the Bank of Canada’s version of the Global Economy Model structured to incorporate an active banking system that features an interbank market and cross-border lending. After describing the new model, the authors use it to examine the responses of selected U.S. and Canadian macroeconomic variables to a “credit crunch” in the United States and also to study the impact of changes in the regulatory limits to bank leverage in Canada. They also discuss the relative merits of a monetary policy framework based on inflation targeting and one based on price-level targeting in the presence of shocks to the U.S. and Canadian banking sectors.

This note uses industry data and a unique dataset of small and medium-sized merchants to provide insights into the acquirer-merchant market in Canada.

How do deglobalization and rising trade costs affect monetary policy? A two-country, multi-sector model of Canada and the United States shows that bilateral trade-cost shocks generate a manageable inflation–output trade-off under the existing framework — but larger or more persistent shocks would make look-through policies costlier and riskier.

The Bank projects that the Canadian economy will continue to grow in line with its potential through 2020.