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The payments landscape in Canada is rapidly changing and will continue to evolve, fuelled by strong and persistent drivers. In Canada, the Canadian Payments Association (CPA) is on a path to modernize Canada’s core payment systems.

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Depression Scrip

The examples of Depression scrip illustrated here are part of the National Currency Collection of the Bank of Canada.

This survey took place in the third quarter of 2021, after most Canadians had been fully vaccinated against COVID-19 and as the Delta variant was beginning to spread more broadly in Canada. Results suggest that consumers plan to increase their spending significantly but remain cautious because of the Delta variant. Canadians think inflation will be higher in the near term due to supply disruptions, but they do not expect this situation to last. Although expectations for labour market conditions improved again, visible minorities, Indigenous people and people with disabilities are showing signs of vulnerabilities. Canadians are not expecting significant wage gains despite recent improvements in the labour market and perceptions of higher inflation.

The emergence of digital currencies such as Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain and distribution ledger technology have attracted significant attention. These developments have raised the possibility of considerable impacts on the financial system and perhaps the wider economy.

Deputy Governor Lawrence Schembri discusses the need to address cross-border obstacles to greater financial integration.

This paper examines the ability of linear and nonlinear models to replicate features of real Canadian GDP. We evaluate the models using various business-cycle metrics.

We analyze how a wealth shift to emerging countries may lead to instability in developed countries. Investors exposed to expropriation risk are willing to pay a safety premium to invest in countries with good property rights.

What path should policy-makers select for the nominal rate when faced with a liquidity trap during which the effective lower bound binds?

The substantial variation in the real price of oil since 2003 has renewed interest in the question of how to forecast monthly and quarterly oil prices. There also has been increased interest in the link between financial markets and oil markets, including the question of whether financial market information helps forecast the real price of oil in physical markets.

Economists in the nineteenth century spent considerable time discussing the merits of a free-banking system, in which each commercial bank would be able to issue its own notes and deposits, subject to a convertibility requirement backed by its own gold reserves. Such a system, the proponents argued, would be able to deliver price-level stability yet be flexible enough to withstand the vicissitudes of the business cycle. Moreover, there would be no need for central banks. While this idea has received less attention in recent years, some economists still put it forward as a practical alternative to the current system. Laidler suggests that the centralizing tendencies in banking would inevitably undermine competition within a free-banking system, and lead to the natural emergence of one dominant bank. Other developments in the twentieth century, most notably the demise of the gold standard and widespread agreement that governments should play a determining role in setting monetary policy goals, have also limited the practicality of such a system. Laidler examines the Bank of Canada's history from the free-banking perspective and concludes that the current system of inflation targeting provides a much better anchor for orderly price-level behaviour than the free-banking system's convertibility could ever guarantee.