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Chinese Coin Charms

The charms on the cover are part of the National Currency Collection of the Bank of Canada.

Photography by Gord Carter.

This article sets out the Bank’s mandate for regulatory oversight of clearing and settlement systems, the strategy that is followed, and the key activities relevant to the conduct of oversight.

This special issue of the Review, “Lessons from the Financial Crisis,” examines the recent research on the role of liquidity in the financial system and on the public policy responses that aimed to restore stability to the financial system during the crisis and to foster economic recovery.

In this paper the author examines whether there is significant evidence of the effect of adjustment costs on Canadian labour demand. This is an important question, as sluggish adjustment of labour demand resulting from significant adjustment costs may be one factor that could help explain some of the unemployment persistence found in Canadian data. The […]

Can monetary policy be used to promote financial stability? We answer this question by estimating the impact of a monetary policy shock on private-sector leverage and the likelihood of a financial crisis. Impulse responses obtained from a panel VAR model of 18 advanced countries suggest that the debt-to-GDP ratio rises in the short run following an unexpected tightening in monetary policy.

More than 80 central banks use a committee to take monetary policy decisions. The composition of the committee and the structure of the meeting can affect the quality of the decision making.

This paper explores the arguments for and against a common currency for Canada and the United States and attempts to determine whether such an arrangement would offer any significant advantages for Canada compared with the present flexible exchange rate system. The paper first reviews the theoretical arguments advanced in the economics literature in support of fixed and flexible currency arrangements. A discussion of Canada's past experience with the two exchange rate systems follows, after which there is a survey of the empirical evidence published on Canada's current and prospective suitability for some form of fixed currency arrangement with the United States. The final section of the paper examines critically a number of concerns raised about the behaviour of the current flexible exchange rate system.

When a bank holds a lot of safe assets, it is well situated to deal with funding stress. But when all banks hold a lot of safe assets, a pecuniary externality implies that their (wholesale) funding costs increase. This reduces banks’ ability to hold capital buffers and thus, paradoxically, increases the frequency of funding stress.

Previous studies on whether the nature of the exchange rate regime influences a country's medium-term growth performance have been based on a tripartite classification scheme that distinguishes between pegged, intermediate, and flexible exchange rate regimes.

This paper surveys recent developments in the theoretical and empirical literature on the economic implications of uncertainty about the longer-term outlook for inflation. In particular, the linkages between inflation, long-run inflation uncertainty, and aggregate economic activity in industrial economies have become considerably better understood during the past decade.