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This paper examines the contribution of several supply factors to US headline inflation since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. We identify six supply shocks using a structural VAR model: labor supply, labor productivity, global supply chain, oil price, price mark-up and wage mark-up shocks.

The theme of the conference, "managing the recovery," is particularly timely: As we move past the gravest dangers of the financial crisis toward better days, attention has turned to the policy challenges posed by the recovery.

Recent evidence suggests that the extent of downward nominal wage rigidity (DNWR) in the Canadian labour market has risen following the 2008–09 recession (see Brouillette, Kostyshyna and Kyui 2016).

We are experiencing a commodity super cycle. Throughout the current boom, the scale of price increases has been higher, and the range of affected commodities broader, than in previous upturns. Since 2002, grain and oilseed prices have more than doubled, base metals prices have tripled, and oil prices have quadrupled.

Bank of Canada liquidity actions in response to the financial market turmoil; understanding corporate bond spreads using credit default swaps; review of the conflicts of interest between participants in the securitization process highlighting the most recent policy measures and potential solutions for ameliorating these agency issues.

Price controls, or caps, can lead to shortages, as 1970’s gasoline price controls illustrate. One million trades show that the market for borrowing bonds in Canada has an implicit price cap: traders are willing to pay no more than the overnight interest rate to borrow a bond. This suggests the probability of a shortage increases when interest rates are very low.

Flood, Morin, and Kolet examine the role of house prices in household consumption decisions. Considering a group of advanced economies, the authors find that the strength of the link between house prices and consumer spending depends on the institutional features of national mortgage markets.

Feedback rules are rules aimed at guiding policy-makers as they face the problem of keeping inflation close to a desired path without causing variability elsewhere in the economy. These rules link short-term interest rates, controlled by the central bank, to the rate of inflation and/or its deviation from a target rate. The authors describe the most popular types of feedback rules and review some simulation results.

Growth has slowed in many emerging-market economies (EMEs) since the 2007–09 global financial crisis, reflecting both cyclical and structural factors. In this context, it will be in-creasingly important for EMEs to raise potential growth by maintaining steady progress on structural reforms. How do structural reforms generally support growth? What are the re-form priorities for EMEs over recent history and today? Finally, what will be the impact of planned structural reforms on potential output growth among the world’s larger EMEs? These are some of the questions considered by the authors.

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.