Many conservative economists and policy-makers, not least the C D Howe Institute and its corporate allies, are sounding the alarm about potential inflation in the opinion pages of the Globe and Mail and the National Post.

Since the 1980s, financial crises have erupted about once a decade. The last one erupted in 2008. And there are disturbing parallels between the 1980s debt crisis in Latin America, the 1990s financial crisis in Asia, and the deepening financial turmoil in emerging markets such as Turkey today. Which is why it is surprising that the subject of the next crisis was missing from this year’s agenda at the annual economic policy symposium, in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

On July 13^th, the Bank of Canada began to tighten monetary policy, arguing that the economy would be operating at full capacity by the end of this year. This action was guided more by the economic dogma of a “natural” unemployment rate crafted by Milton Friedman back in the 1970s than by hard evidence of a looming increase in inflation.