We present a policy framework for electronic money and payments. The framework poses a set of positive questions related to the areas of responsibility of central banks: payments systems, monetary policy and financial stability. The questions are posed to four broad forms of e-money: privately...

The authors present a detailed discussion of the Bank of Canadas' framework for the implementation of monetary policy. As background, they provide a brief overview of the financial system in Canada, including a discussion of the financial services industry and the money market. Key features of...

To investigate the extent to which the transparency of the Bank of Canada’s monetary policy has improved, the authors examine empirically – over the period 30 October 2000 to 31 May 2007 – the reaction of Canadian financial markets to official Bank communications, and in particular their...

Relevant literature on asset-liability management (ALM) is reviewed and different ALM approaches are discussed that may be of interest to the Bank of Canada for the purpose of modelling the Exchange Fund Account (EFA). The author describes the general idea behind ALM, its pros and cons, risk...

The recovery in private business investment globally remains extremely weak more than seven years after the financial crisis. This paper contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the factors behind this weakness by analyzing the role of growth prospects and uncertainty in explaining...

The 2007-09 global financial crisis has led policy-makers around the world, including central banks, to refocus their efforts to promote financial stability. As part of this process, central banks became quite active in supporting financial stability in a variety of ways, such as publicly...

Digital currencies have attracted strong interest in recent years and have the potential to become widely adopted for use in making payments. Public authorities and central banks around the world are closely monitoring developments in digital currencies and studying their implications for the...

A key issue in the renewal of the inflation-control agreement is the question of the appropriate level of the inflation target. Many observers have raised concerns that with the reduction in the neutral rate, and the experience of the recent financial crisis, the effective lower bound (ELB) is...

This paper summarizes the international evidence on the performance of quantitative easing (QE) as a monetary policy tool when conventional policy rates are constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB). A large body of evidence suggests that expanding the central bank's balance sheet through...

Forward guidance is one of the policy tools that a central bank can implement if it seeks to provide additional monetary stimulus when it is operating at the effective lower bound (ELB) on interest rates. It became more widely used during and after the global financial crisis. This paper reviews...