John Crow's 1988 Hanson Lecture argued for making price stability the goal of Canada's monetary policy, but in the early 1990s, political and economic circumstances led policy makers to settle for a 2 percent inflation target instead. The recently instituted review of the Inflation Control...

Successes and failures in monetary policy stem mainly from coherence or lack thereof in the monetary order, rather than the tactical skills of policy makers. Crucial here are questions of consistency among the economic ideas that the policy regime embodies, the way in which the economy actually...

It is argued that today's Canadian monetary system has certain important characteristics in common with a free banking regime such as might have evolved had matters been left to market forces, and that the Bank of Canada's recent success probably has more than a little to do with this fact. It...

The usual description of Keynes's macroeconomics as relying on the postulate of money wage stickiness to explain unemployment, and advocating fiscal policy as its cure, is largely mythical. Rather he was concerned with exploring the theoretical idea that an economy co- ordinated by monetary...

This paper briefly discusses why a monetary policy framework that emphasises interest rates has become standard in recent years, and why so many economists have been persuaded simultaneously to downgrade the importance of monetary aggregates. Then it describes Michael Woodford's particular...

From Henry Thornton (1802), through Walter Bagehot (1873) until Ralph Hawtrey (1932), the lender of last resort function was central to the theory of central bank behaviour. In that role, the bank was urged to aid individual banks in times of crisis, but also and crucially to provide liquidity...

Knut Wickwell's "pure credit economy" and Michael Woodford's "cashless economy" have much in common whereas Wickwell's model was developed in order to extend an already existing theoretical framewok, Woodford's is presented as constituting, in and of itself, a foundation for the theory of...

In today's discussions of central banking, maintaining macro-financial stability has only recently appeared along-side the pursuit of low inflation as an important policy goal. This is in strong contrast to the earlier literature, where financial stability was often the main concern of the...

The monetary economy has properties that cannot be analyzed using the tools of today's dynamic general equilibrium analysis. Keynes's economics, far from being an aberration in the otherwise orderly evolution of modern macroeconomics from Adam Smith's ideas about the "invisible hand", was a...

The debate about whether Canada should seek some form of monetary integration with the United States is surveyed. It is argued that the choice here is among overall monetary orders, rather than among exchange rate regimes considered in isolation, with particular attention needing to be paid to...