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This article reviews and examines some of the main explanations for the slow growth that many advanced economies continue to experience seven years after the 2007–09 global financial crisis. Does this muted recovery reflect just a prolonged cycle in the aftermath of a financial crisis? Is it due to a structural inadequacy of demand leading to a long-lasting liquidity trap? Or is it largely supply side in nature, reflecting demographic and technological factors?

This article examines the efforts of the major advanced countries to strengthen the international financial system in order to avoid financial crises such as those that occurred in emerging-market economies in the 1990s. These efforts have focused on crisis prevention and crisis management. The prevention of such crises has necessitated the formation of new international groups that include emerging markets in their membership. Measures have also been taken to reduce the vulnerability of countries to such crises. These measures have centered on the need for appropriate macroeconomic policies, including the need for sustainable exchange rate regimes, sound domestic financial systems, and prudent risk management. In the area of crisis management, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been given access to additional resources for lending to countries that experience financial crises. The IMF has also established new lending facilities for use in such circumstances. It has also been agreed that the private sector will need to play a greater role in the management of such crises in the future.

The industry standard for seasonally adjusting data, X-13ARIMA-SEATS, is not suitable for high-frequency data. We summarize and assess several of the most popular seasonal adjustment methods for weekly data given the increased availability and promise of non-traditional data at higher frequencies.

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.

Governor Tiff Macklem discusses how the economy will continue to adjust to higher interest rates in the year ahead, and outlines what Canadians can expect from the Bank of Canada.

Financial market expectations regarding future changes in the target for the overnight rate of interest are an important source of information for the Bank of Canada. Financial markets are the mechanism through which the policy rate affects other financial variables, such as longer-term interest rates, the exchange rate, and other asset prices. An accurate measure of their expectations can therefore help policy-makers assess the potential impact of contemplated changes. Johnson focuses on the expectations hypothesis, which measures expectations of future levels of the target overnight rate as implied by current money market yields. Although expectations can be derived from the current yield on any short-term fixed-income asset, some assets have proven to be more accurate predictors than others. The implementation of a policy of fixed-announcements dates has coincided with the increased predictive power of these short-term assets. As a result of this improvement, a relatively simple model of the yield curve can now provide an accurate measure of financial market expectations.

Cash use for payments has been steadily decreasing in many countries, including Canada and Sweden. This might suggest an evolution toward a cashless society. But in Canada, cash in circulation relative to GDP has been stable for decades and has even increased in recent years. By contrast, the cash-to-GDP ratio in Sweden has been falling steadily. What has caused this difference? Are there lessons to be learned from comparing the Canadian and Swedish experiences?

On 8 and 9 June 2000, the Bank held a seminar to examine some key issues affecting the upcoming decision on Canada's inflation-control target for the period after 2001. The main issues covered at the seminar were the extent of downward nominal-wage rigidity and its implications for employment as well as the relative merits of price-level targeting versus inflation targeting. Another critical question that was discussed was how to balance the evidence on all the relevant issues in order to develop an overall view on the appropriate long-run target. The author gives a brief overview of the seminar followed by detailed summaries of individual papers.

This note presents PULSE, a new measure of underlying inflation in Canada based on a dynamic factor model estimated on disaggregated inflation data. PULSE captures the persistent component of inflation and decomposes it into broad-based and sector-specific inflationary pressures.