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In addition to its primary role as the country's central bank, the Bank of Canada also acts as the federal government's banker and financial adviser. One of the activities associated with this role as fiscal agent is managing the government's Canadian dollar balances. This function is examined in this article. The main priority is to ensure that the government has sufficient cash to meet its daily needs. This requires careful forecasting and monitoring of the government's daily receipt and expenditure flows, as well as an ongoing borrowing program to refinance maturing debt and to replenish the balances during periods when outflows, on average, exceed inflows. The cost of borrowing to raise cash balances for the government is considerably higher than the interest earned on any balances that are available "on demand." To reduce this net cost, balances in excess of those required for daily needs are invested in "term" deposits that earn a higher rate of interest than that earned on the demand balances. The net cost of holding government balances has also been reduced through the use of cash management bills, which are flexible, short-term borrowing instruments that complement the government's regular weekly issues of 3-, 6- and 12-month treasury bills.

Central banks face considerable uncertainty when conducting monetary policy. The COVID-19 pandemic brought this issue back to the forefront of policy discussions. We draw from academic literature to review key sources of uncertainty and how they affect the conduct of monetary policy.

We provide empirical evidence on the impact of oil supply shocks on global aggregates. To do this, we first extract structural oil supply shocks from a standard oil-price determination model found in the literature.

This is the first of the Financial Markets Department’s descriptions of Canadian financial industrial organization. The document discusses the organization of the repurchase-agreement (repo) market in Canada.

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Silver Presentation Salver

The salver, which was bequeathed to the Bank of Canada by Lady Macmillan in 1967, is part of the artifact collection of the Bank of Canada Archives.
Photography by Mone Cheng, Innovacom, Ottawa.

Deputy Governor Tim Lane discusses the global economic outlook and the integral – and historic – role of transport and logistics in building Canada’s prosperity.

An effective exchange rate is a measure of the value of a country's currency vis-à-vis the currencies of its most important trading partners. The Bank of Canada has created a new Canadian-dollar effective exchange rate index (CERI) to replace the C-6 index that it currently uses. The CERI uses multilateral trade weights published by the International Monetary Fund and includes the six currencies of countries or economic zones with the largest share of Canada's international trade. As such, it better reflects the recent changes in Canada's trade profile, including the rise in the importance of China and Mexico and the relative decline in importance of Europe and Japan in Canada's international trade. The author describes the methodology and construction of the new index and reviews the advantages it offers over the C-6, particularly the use of multilateral trade weights, the inclusion of trade in services, and the use of more recent trade data.

In a speech to the Vancouver Board of Trade, Governor Mark Carney discusses the fundamentals of the Canadian residential real estate market, the international context, and the implications for monetary policy.

Text of major 1995 lecture by Bank Governor Gordon Thiessen, plus articles from Bank of Canada Review and other sources