Taylor Webley is Assistant Director of the Real Sector Stability (RSS) division in the Financial Stability Department. He is responsible for overseeing work on financial stability issues related to Canada’s business and housing sectors, as well as potential links back to the macroeconomy. Previously, he worked as Principal Economist in RSS, helping lead its ongoing assessments of household and business vulnerabilities, examining the drivers of mortgage arrears, and evaluating the state of household’s asset buffers. Prior to joining FSD in 2023, Taylor was Principal Economist in the Canadian Economic Analysis (CEA) Department where he worked on both the monitoring and projection teams and co-developed the department’s probabilistic nowcasting infrastructure. Taylor joined the Bank in 2013 as an Economist in International’s United States Division after completing his Master of Arts, Economics, at Queen’s University.
Mortgage debt represents over 70% of all Canadian household financial liabilities, and the performance of these debts is critical to the health of the financial system. We explore the relationships between mortgage arrears and key macroeconomic fundamentals such as labour market variables, interest rates, house prices and inflation. We then develop a framework to assess future household mortgage stress.
Household savings in Canada have increased significantly since 2019, especially among homeowners without a mortgage. We assess how savings buffers can mitigate households’ financial risk in relation to asset repricing, mortgage payment renewal and unemployment.
We present a tool for creating density nowcasts for Canadian real GDP growth. We demonstrate that the combined densities are a reliable and accurate tool for assessing the state of the economy and risks to the outlook.
Real growth in gross domestic product tends to be meaningfully higher when a large share of industries and demand components are growing—that is, when growth is broad across many fronts.
We use a recently developed model and loan-level microdata to decompose movements in housing resales since 2015. We find that fundamental factors, namely housing affordability and full-time employment, have had offsetting effects on resales over our study period.
Existing home sales’ share of Canada’s economic pie has been rising in recent years, and variation around this trend has resulted in outsized contributions to changes in real gross domestic product (GDP). In this context, we use a cointegration framework to estimate the level of resale activity across the Canadian provinces that is supported by fundamentals—namely, full-time employment, housing affordability and migration flows—to help look through the volatility.
