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Senior Deputy Governor Wilkins discusses how the Bank is tackling the most important strategic challenges facing central banks today and how innovative thinking is critical to its success.

Although the global financial system continues to recover gradually from the unprecedented dislocations experienced in recent years, significant downside risks remain. Market concerns over acute fiscal strains in some euro-area countries have intensified sharply in recent weeks.

FSR Highlights - December 2010

Over the last 30 years, the business mix of banks in Canada has changed significantly. Progress in information-processing technology, legislative changes, and market forces have combined to blur the traditional distinctions between banks and other financial institutions and have allowed banks to offer a much wider range of products and services. In this article, the author reviews the expansion of bank lending to households over this period and their recent movement into personal wealth management. While these trends were facilitated by revisions to legislation, they also reflected the changing needs of the "baby boom" generation, first as home-buyers and, more recently, as middle-aged investors. On the commercial and corporate side, banks reacted to the rapid expansion of securities markets (and to the reduced demand for intermediation by both lenders/depositors and borrowers) by moving into investment banking, after legislative changes opened this business to them in the late 1980s. They also used their expertise in credit assessment and risk management to provide credit guarantees and to act as counterparties and intermediaries in derivatives markets. Notable in this broadening of bank activities has been their more recent entry into the trust, mutual fund, and retail brokerage business. The banks have also made preliminary forays into insurance. The expansion of off-balance-sheet activities has made fee income an increasingly important part of bank earnings. The article also looks at the emerging tools and techniques that will most likely transform the structure of banking in the future.

The premise that exchange rate pass-through has declined is critically reassessed; intensity in the negative feedback process between financial sector developments and the real economy during the recent global crisis is examined; update on past decade’s changing trends in debt issuance in Canada relative to those in other capital markets.

Governor Stephen S. Poloz discusses key issues involved in the Governing Council’s deliberations about the policy rate decision and the MPR.

Following growth of 1.8 per cent in 2012, the Canadian economy is expected to grow by 1.5 per cent in 2013, 2.8 percent in 2014 and 2.7 in 2015, and to reach full capacity in mid-2015, later than anticipated in the January Report.

We investigate the risks and opportunities to the mandates of central banks arising from fintech developments.

We study settlement fails for trades in the Government of Canada bond market. We find that settlement fails do not occur independently. Using a novel and comprehensive dataset, we examine three drivers of fails.

Using stock market data on banks, we show that the book value of loans recognizes losses with a delay. This delayed accounting is important for regulation because the requirements regulators impose are based on book values.

This report highlights how an effective resolution regime promotes financial stability. It does this by ensuring that financial market infrastructures (FMIs) would be able to continue to provide their critical functions during a period of stress when an FMI’s own recovery measures were failing. The report explains the Bank of Canada’s new role as the resolution authority for FMIs, which will further bolster financial system resilience.