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Can regulators keep pace with banks’ creative regulatory workarounds? Our analysis unpacks the trade-offs between fixed regulations and crisis-triggered rules, showing that the latter are especially prone to circumvention—and can trigger larger, costlier bailouts.

Risk-management systems in financial institutions have come under increasing scrutiny in light of the current financial crisis, resulting in calls for improvements and an increased role for regulators. Yet such objectives miss the intricacy at the heart of the risk-management process. This article outlines the complexity inherent in any modern risk-management system, which arises because there are shortcuts in the theoretical models that risk managers need to be aware of, as well as the difficulties in sensible calibration of model parameters. The author suggests that prudential regulation of such systems should focus on failures within the financial firm and in the market interactions between firms and reviews possible strategies that can improve the performance of risk management and microprudential regulatory practice.

I propose a novel method to identify and estimate the macroeconomic effects of forward guidance and large-scale asset purchases (LSAP) for each FOMC announcement. I find that LSAP is more important than forward guidance in influencing output and inflation. LSAP puts upward pressure on short-term yields, so it should always be used in conjunction with forward guidance.

The Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE) focuses on respondents’ views on inflation, the labour market and household finances. The survey for the second quarter of 2020 was conducted from May 11 to June 1, 2020. Given the ongoing pandemic, in this survey, specific questions were added about the impact on Canadians of COVID‑19 and the measures to contain the spread of the virus.

This note analyzes the evolution of the narrative in the Bank of Canada’s Monetary Policy Report (MPR). It presents descriptive statistics on the core text, including length, most frequently used words and readability level—the three Ls. Although each Governor of the Bank of Canada focuses on the macroeconomic events of the day and the mandate of inflation targeting, we observe that the language used in the MPR varies somewhat from one Governor’s tenure to the next.

Households report distinctive views of the macroeconomy along partisan lines, while their expectations about personal finances do not follow the same pattern. Economic inequality remains the major contributor to polarized views of the macroeconomy. Partisan politics are simply a magnifier.

We compare the determinants of consumer inflation expectations in the US and Canada by analyzing two current surveys. We find that Canadian consumers rely more on professional forecasts and the history of actual inflation when forming their expectations, while US consumers rely more on their own lagged expectations.

In this article, the authors review work done at the Bank of Canada and at other central banks with the relatively new application of network analysis to the study of payments systems.

Central banks are still defining their approach to financial stability and are at an early stage in the development of useful models. The Bank of Canada's 2007 economic conference was organized to stimulate progress in the development of financial-stability frameworks. Among the highlights reported here are the discussions centred around three proposed frameworks: a contingent-claims-analysis framework, a semi-structural framework, and structural financial-stability models. Participants also reported on their experiences with stress-testing under the International Monetary Fund's Financial Sector Assessment Program and discussed the implications for financial stability of linkages among payment, clearing, and settlement systems.

The Bank of Canada’s current suite of models faces challenges in addressing network effects that integrate household and firm-level heterogeneity and their behaviours. We develop CANVAS, a Canadian behavioural agent-based model to contribute to the Bank’s next-generation modelling effort. CANVAS improves forecasting performance and expands capacity for model-based scenario analysis.