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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.

Deputy Governor Rhys Mendes discusses how monetary policy worked to bring inflation back down to target and why the Bank wants inflation to stay close to 2%.

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.

This paper investigates high-frequency (HF) market and limit orders in the U.S. Treasury market around major macroeconomic news announcements. BrokerTec introduced i- Cross at the end of 2007 and we use this exogenous event as an instrument to analyze the impact of HF activities on liquidity and price efficiency.

Choosing a well-designed framework for fiscal and monetary policies is a challenge for economic authorities.

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.

As part of their policy response to the financial crisis of 2007–09, central banks introduced numerous unprecedented monetary policy measures to provide monetary easing. This article defines and documents these measures, focusing on central bank asset purchases and their impact on central bank balance sheets. It then discusses the challenges of identifying the effects of these measures and explores possible exit strategies. The potential costs of these policies are also analyzed, as well as the broader implications for monetary policy frameworks.

We show that issuing a deposit-like central bank digital currency (CBDC) with a proper interest rate would encourage banks to pay higher interest to keep their customers. Banks would then attract more deposits and offer more loans. Hence, a CBDC would not necessarily crowd out private banking.

After a period with the interest rate at the effective lower bound, temporarily overshooting inflation may offer important economic benefits. This may be especially true for vulnerable segments of the population, such as workers with low attachment to the labour force and the long-term unemployed.

Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2009, over 2,000 cryptocurrencies have been issued. We evaluate how well a cryptocurrency functions as a payment system.