Search

One year later, we review the events that took place in Canadian fixed-income markets at the beginning of the COVID-19 crisis and propose potential policy research questions for future work.

We expect global potential output growth to increase from 2.5% in 2022 to 2.8% by 2026. Compared with the April 2022 staff assessment, global potential output growth is marginally slower. The current range for the US neutral rate is 2% to 3%, unchanged from the last annual assessment.

The global economic recovery is proceeding but is not yet self-sustaining. Greater emphasis on balance sheet repair by households, banks, and governments in a number of advanced economies is expected to temper the pace of global growth relative to the Bank’s outlook in April.

Severe disruptions in the financial markets, as observed during the 2008 global financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic, can impair the stability of the entire financial system and worsen macroeconomic downturns.

Deputy Governor Timothy Lane discusses the causes of the recent drop in oil prices and its effects on the global and Canadian economies.

The Canadian overnight repo market persistently shows signs of latent funding pressure around month-end periods. Both the overnight repo rate and Bank of Canada liquidity provision tend to rise in these windows. This paper proposes three non-mutually exclusive hypotheses to explain this phenomenon.

This issue of the Financial System Review reflects the Bank’s judgment that the overall level of risk to Canada’s financial system remains largely unchanged from six months ago. The Bank continues to highlight two key vulnerabilities related to Canadian households: high levels of indebtedness and housing market imbalances. A third ongoing vulnerability is the potential for fragility in fixed-income market liquidity.

The decline in safe real interest rates over the past three decades has reignited discussions on the neutral real interest rate, known as R*. We address the determinants and estimation methods of R*, as well as the factors influencing its decline and its future trajectory.

The Canadian financial system comprises financial markets, financial institutions, and the clearing and settlement systems.

A series of major international financial crises in the 1990s, and the recent introduction of the euro, have renewed interest in alternative exchange rate systems. The choice of exchange rate regime is particularly relevant for emerging-market countries because other countries are perceived either as having no alternative to their current exchange rate arrangement or as highly unlikely to change. This article examines the evolution of exchange rate regimes in emerging markets over the past decade and compares the strengths and weaknesses of the various available systems. These include intermediate regimes, such as the adjustable pegged exchange rate popular throughout much of the post—war period, and the two extreme exchange rate regimes: permanently fixed or freely floating exchange rate regimes. Two recently proposed alternatives are also evaluated: the Managed Floating Plus and Baskets, Bands, and Crawling Pegs. Both try to combine the best elements of the flexible and fixed exchange rate systems, but the Managed Floating Plus is deemed to be the more promising alternative.