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The Reports section of the Financial System Review examines selected issues of relevance to the Canadian and global financial systems. The June 2015 issue features two reports summarizing recent work by Bank of Canada staff on specific financial sector policies.

This paper predicts phases of the financial cycle by using a continuous financial stress measure in a Markov switching framework. The debt service ratio and property market variables signal a transition to a high financial stress regime, while economic sentiment indicators provide signals for a transition to a tranquil state.

This issue features a summary of the Bank’s annual conference, which took place in November 2011 and dealt with payments systems, and two articles that present research by Bank staff on global current account imbalances and macrofinancial risk assessment. The fourth article in this issue reviews the recent experience with inflation targeting.

The Canadian economy entered 2022 in a strong position. The Bank is forecasting growth of 4% in 2022 and about 3½ % in 2023.

Previous studies on whether the nature of the exchange rate regime influences a country's medium-term growth performance have been based on a tripartite classification scheme that distinguishes between pegged, intermediate, and flexible exchange rate regimes.

We use data from the Survey of Financial Security and the Survey of Household Spending to estimate the incidence and extent of income under-reporting in Canada in 1998 and 2004. We estimate that the proportion of households under-reporting income is roughly 35 to 50 per cent in both years.

The year 2006 marked a turning point for the Bank of Canada. We successfully completed our medium-term plan, The Way Forward, and began writing a fresh chapter in the Bank’s history based on a new three-year plan. In this annual report, we do more than give an accounting of past achievements. We also provide forward-looking information on the plans and priorities in our new medium-term plan. And as we advance, we are always mindful of the Bank’s original mandate, set out more than 70 years ago, to “promote the economic and financial welfare of Canada.”

The five articles in this issue present research and analysis by Bank staff covering a variety of topics: the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves; the emergence of platform-based digital currencies; methods of forecasting the real price of oil; measures of uncertainty in monetary policy; and the recent performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States.

The Bank projects the Canadian economy will grow by 2.4 per cent in 2012 and 2013 before moderating to 2.2 per cent in 2014. The economy is now expected to return to full capacity in the first half of 2013.

The intertemporal current account approach predicts that the current account of a small open economy is independent of global shocks, and that responses of the current account to country-specific shocks depend on the persistence of the shocks. The author shows that these predictions impose cross-equation restrictions (CERS) on a structural vector autoregression (SVAR).