, we have stepped up efforts to engage with a wide variety of stakeholder groups beyond our traditional partners. our goals are to reach canadians directly and increase public knowledge of and participation in our activities in order to broaden understanding of our work and to build trust. a number of activities to engage the public are upcoming or already underway. these include an online campaign to involve the public in the 2021 renewal of our inflation - targeting framework. we also just concluded a campaign inviting the public to nominate an iconic canadian to be featured on the next five dollar note. let me stop there. senior deputy governor wilkins and i would now be happy to answer your questions. 4 / 4 bis central bankers'speeches

was inevitably some uncertainty about the prospects of the new regime and the new currency that it issued. the circulation of swiss dinars in kurdish controlled iraq during the 1990s was a market solution to the problem of devising a medium of exchange in the absence of a government with the power to issue currency. changes in the relative price of swiss and saddam dinars show that the value of money depends on beliefs about the probability of survival of the institutions that define the state itself. v. case study 3 : monetary policy in japan and the zero bound on interest rates my third case study shows that institutional arrangements need to be consonant with the underlying economics, or failure will result. recent experience in japan has led to the rebirth of interest in monetary policy when official interest rates are constrained by the zero lower bound. official shortterm interest rates in japan have been approximately zero since the beginning of 1999. of particular interest in this context is the question of how responsibilities should be divided between the central bank, on the one hand, and the finance ministry, on the other. guy debelle and stanley fischer ( 1994 ) introduced the distinction between instrument and goal independence of central banks. that distinction has become the standard framework within which to analyse the optimal constitution of central banks. but such a distinction presumes the existence of a source : compiled by the central bank of iraq, based on data collected by the united nations world food program. policy instrument that is uniquely available to the central bank. that instrument is the level of official short - term interest rates. but when interest rates are constrained at their lower bound of zero, the position is much less clear. indeed, i shall argue that in such circumstances both instrument and goal independence are impossible. rather when interest rates are at their zero lower bound, policy relies on successful cooperation between central bank and finance ministry. i shall assume that, when interest rates are zero, monetary policy takes the form of open market purchases or sales of government securities using central bank money. a well - known policy prescription, which has become known as unconventional monetary policy, is that the central bank should buy long - term government bonds rather than the more conventional shortterm bills. the bank of japan did indeed follow this prescription. the logic of such a proposal is as follows. long - term bonds are likely to contain a significant premium to compensate investors for their lack of liquidity - the fact that, in practice, investors face significant costs when switching between bonds and goods. when the central bank offers to