With rising inflation top-of-mind for Canadians, a major question is: Can we predict its future? This Commentary shows that growth in the money supply is a useful predictor of inflation, and examines why and when.Since the early 1990s, the Bank of Canada has pursued a successful...

The Bank of Canada should weigh how income inequality affects monetary policy effectiveness as it pursues its 2 percent inflation target, says a new report from the C.D. Howe Institute.In “Monetary Policy, Income Inequality, and Inflation — What's the Link?” authors Jeremy Kronick and...

The surge of inflation as economies recovered from the COVID lockdowns of 2020 and 2021 took central bankers and most other observers by surprise. Canada was no exception. Year-over-year CPI inflation rose from -0.4 percent at its nadir in May 2020, to a peak of 8.1 percent in June 2022 before...

The effectiveness of monetary policy depends, to a large extent, on market expectations of its future actions. In a standard New Keynesian business cycle model with rational expectations, systematic monetary policy reduces the variance of inflation and output gap by at least two-thirds. These...

This paper examines the value of direct communication to households about inflation and the uncertainty around inflation statistics. All types of information about inflation are effective at immediately managing inflation expectations, with information about outlooks being more effective and...