A Memorandum Submitted to the Canadian Royal Commission on Banking and Finance

Abstract

In the admirable statement issued on the morrow of his appointment, the Governor of the Bank of Canada alluded to the ‘broad economic objectives of high-level employment, price stability and sustained economic growth’. As a means to the attainment of these ends, he emphasised the need for the coordination of financial policy with general economic policy, the former in turn consisting in the three ‘interdependent and to some extent interchangeable’ strands of monetary policy, fiscal policy and debt-management policy. I shall try to arrange my remarks in the light of these two dissections, the one of ends, the other of means; bearing in mind as regards the second that, as I understand it, the Commission’s primary concern is with the genus ‘financial’, and within that genus with the species ‘monetary’.