The Bank announces changes to its framework for financial market operations and emergency lending assistance policies and provides summaries of its public consultations.
As announced today, the Bank of Canada is introducing 1- and 3-month Term Repo operations that will be built up to a target portfolio size of $7 billion to $10 billion over a 6 month implementation period. Below is the preliminary schedule and amounts for the October to December quarter.
Following the release of the draft Terms for Auctions of Government of Canada Ultra-Long Bonds (proposal) by the Bank of Canada, a three-week consultation period, ending 10 July 2015, was held.
As part of an exercise to test the operational readiness of existing standing swap arrangements with other central banks, the Bank of Canada will conduct a small-value Canadian-dollar operation with the Bank of England, drawing British pounds against Canadian dollars.
As part of the ongoing review of the collateral policy related to the Bank of Canada’s Standing Liquidity Facility (SLF), the Bank has revised the margin requirements applied to certain securities accepted as SLF collateral.
In December 2014, the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act was amended to give the Bank of Canada responsibility for identifying and overseeing payments systems that have the potential to pose payments system risk (these will be referred to as prominent payment systems).
The Bank of Canada undertook public consultations to update its framework for financial market operations and its emergency lending policies to reflect the evolution of the Canadian financial system and lessons learned globally during the 2007–09 financial crisis. As part of the public consultations, the Bank released two consultation papers that proposed several changes to its market operations and to its Emergency Lending Assistance (ELA) policies. The comment period for the consultations ended on 4 July 2015.