I am thinking here of the increased uncertainty about the future, the distortion of vital signals and information that people rely on to make important decisions, the ups and downs in  BIS Review 15/2001  1  output and employment, and the waste of valuable economic resources as they are diverted from productive investments to speculative activities.
All of this should be enough to strengthen our collective resolve not to let inflation break out again. And it convinces me that the focus of Canadian monetary policy since the early 1990s on low and predictable inflation as an essential building block of a productive, well-functioning economy has been exactly right.