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This paper examines the relationship between house prices and consumption, through the use of debt. Using unique Canadian household-level data that reports the uses of debt, we begin by looking at the relationship between house prices and debt.

Effective 1 November 2003, the Bank of Canada abandoned its practice of backdating the results of settlement of payments through the Automated Clearing Settlement System (ACSS). It has adopted instead a system of "next-day" settlement under which the results of the settlement process will appear on the central bank's books on the day the items actually settle in the ACSS. Since July 1986, settlement of these items had occurred at noon the day after items were presented for clearing, but the results were recognized on the Bank's books the previous day, through backdating, or "retroactive" settlement. The new system should simplify the payments process and improve the reporting of settlement risk, as well as promote cost-effectiveness within the payments systems. ACSS participants have agreed among themselves to implement an interest-compensation mechanism in order to avoid imposing a float charge on their customer base.

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.

This paper presents a model of strategic buyer-seller networks with information exchange between sellers. Prior to engaging in bargaining with buyers, sellers can share access to buyers for a negotiated transfer. We study how this information exchange affects overall market prices, volumes and welfare, given different initial market conditions and information sharing rules.

Empirical work on the underlying causes of the recent dislocations in bank-intermediated trade finance has been limited by the poor availability of hard data. This paper analyzes the key determinants of bank-intermediated trade finance using a novel data set covering ten banking jurisdictions.

We propose a tractable, model-based stress-testing framework where the solvency risks, funding liquidity risks and market risks of banks are intertwined.

The MacroFinancial Risk Assessment Framework (MFRAF) models the interconnections between liquidity and solvency in a financial system, with multiple institutions linked through an interbank network. The MFRAF integrates funding liquidity risk as an endogenous outcome of the interactions between solvency risk and the liquidity profiles of banks, which is a complementary approach to the new […]

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.

This paper examines the determinants of currency crises in Latin America, Asia and Africa. It asks two basic questions: (a) Are currency crises linked to economic fundamentals? and; (b) Is there any evidence of a contagion effect after controlling for the potential effects of economic fundamentals? Using pooled annual data for 19 developing countries spanning […]

The Canadian economy is estimated to have grown by 2.4 per cent in 2011, and is projected to grow by 2.0 per cent in 2012, and 2.8 per cent in 2013, returning to full capacity by the third quarter of 2013. Total CPI inflation is expected to return to the 2 per cent target by the 3rd quarter of 2013.