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It has been a difficult year. The financial turmoil that began mid-2007 deteriorated into a full-blown global financial crisis through 2008. While the resilience and soundness of the Canadian financial system were in many respects exceptional, the scale of the financial crisis and the subsequent global recession had an increasing impact by year’s end on our financial system and our economy.

In this issue of the Financial System Review, the Bank of Canada’s Governing Council judges that the risks to the stability of Canada’s financial system are high and have increased markedly over the past six months, owing primarily to an escalation of the sovereign debt crisis in the euro area and a weaker global economic outlook.

Erratum: The data for Chart 7 on page 8 were plotted incorrectly. See revised chart.

Trade liberalizations increase the sales and input purchases of productive firms relative to their less productive domestic competitors. This reallocation affects firms’ market power in their product and input markets. I quantify how the labour market power of employers affects the distribution and size of the gains from trade.

Throughout the years, Canada has been a major beneficiary of London's innovation. Companies of adventurers, conceived and funded in London, opened up large swathes of Canada to international trade.

Until recently, few efforts have been made to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada (BoC) developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults that is posted on its website and updated in partnership with the Bank of England (BoE).

Following the recent financial crisis, major central banks have introduced several types of unconventional monetary policy measures, including liquidity and credit facilities, asset purchases and forward guidance. To date, these measures appear to have been successful. They restored market functioning, facilitated the transmission of monetary policy and supported economic activity. They have potential costs, however, including challenges related to the greatly expanded balance sheets of central banks and the eventual exit from these measures, as well as the vulnerabilities that can arise from prolonged monetary accommodation.

How do global oil price shocks spread through Canada’s economy? With Canada’s regionally diverse economy in mind, we explore the implications of oil price shocks for Canadian housing markets and regional economies. We show that the belief that oil price shocks only matter in oil-rich regions is false.

This paper examines factors that affect the transmission of fluctuations in global agricultural commodity prices to domestic food inflation.

This paper quantifies the impact of hurricanes on seaborne international trade to the United States. Matching the timing of hurricane–trade route intersections with monthly U.S. port-level trade data, we isolate the unanticipated effects of a hurricane hitting a trade route using two separate identification schemes: an event study and a local projection.

Coletti and Lalonde compare inflation targeting and price-level targeting in the context of a small open economy subject to sizable terms-of-trade shocks. The authors summarize recent research that compares the ability of price-level targeting and inflation targeting to stabilize the macroeconomy when confronted with shocks similar to those experienced by Canada in recent years. Their preliminary results suggest that price-level targeting may represent a feasible alternative to traditional inflation targeting. Their article also provides insight into the direction of current research in this area at the Bank.