In recent years, the Bank of Canada has increasingly made use of microeconomic data to monitor vulnerabilities in the Canadian financial system. In particular, Bank staff have assembled a comprehensive set of indicators to track the evolution of two vulnerabilities in the Canadian economy: the elevated level of household indebtedness and high house prices.
Within the Bank, staff regularly analyze such indicators and discuss the evolution of these vulnerabilities with members of our Governing Council. Externally, the Bank has included some of these indicators in our annual Financial System Review, various public speeches and publications on our Financial System Hub. But these indicators have not been publicly available on an ongoing basis or in a customizable way—until now.
To support our efforts to foster a stable and efficient financial system, and in line with our commitment to transparency and accountability to Canadians, the Bank is launching a new set of indicators of financial vulnerabilities. By sharing the information we regularly monitor, the Bank can help economic observers understand these vulnerabilities and be in a better position to track their evolution over time. To this end, we will update these indicators on our website on a quarterly basis.