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The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

Can macroprudential foreign exchange (FX) regulations on banks reduce the financial and macroeconomic vulnerabilities created by borrowing in foreign currency? To evaluate the effectiveness and unintended consequences of macroprudential FX regulations, we develop a parsimonious model of bank and market lending in domestic and foreign currency and derive four predictions.

We use controlled laboratory experiments to test the causal effects of central bank communication on economic expectations and to distinguish the underlying mechanisms of those effects. In an experiment where subjects learn to forecast economic variables, we find that central bank communication has a stabilizing effect on individual and aggregate outcomes and that the size of the effect varies with the type of communication.

This paper reviews the Canadian and international evidence of the effectiveness of macroprudential policy measures in building resilience and mitigating financial imbalances. The analysis concludes that these measures have broadly achieved their goal of increasing the overall resilience of the financial system to the buildup of imbalances and increasing the financial system’s ability to withstand adverse shocks.

We develop high-frequency, news-based indicators using natural language processing methods to analyze news media texts. Our indicators track both supply (raw, intermediate and final goods) and labour shortages over time. They also provide weekly time-varying topic narratives about various types of shortages.

This issue features a summary of the Bank’s annual conference, which took place in November 2011 and dealt with payments systems, and two articles that present research by Bank staff on global current account imbalances and macrofinancial risk assessment. The fourth article in this issue reviews the recent experience with inflation targeting.

This paper outlines and assesses the various channels through which digitalization can affect prices of goods and services.

We introduce a history of macroprudential policy (MPP) events in Canada since the 1980s. We document the short-run effects of MPP announcements on market-based measures of systemic risk and find that MPPs can influence the market’s perception of large banks’ resilience.

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.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins discusses the financial stability risks associated with slow growth and low interest rates, and explores strategies to mitigate them.