Search

We examine how life insurers manage liquidity risks created by their business model. We find that Canadian life insurers did not face significant liquidity draws and continued their usual investment behaviour during the COVID-19 crisis and as interest rates increased in 2022.

Raising liquidity when funding is stressed creates pressure on the financial market. Liquidating large quantities of assets depresses their prices and may amplify funding shocks. How do banks weathering a funding crisis contribute to contagion risk?

We outline possible system architectures for an online retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) and identify one well-suited for basic payments. We analyze OpenCBDC 2PC, a representative system, finding such designs to be feasible, although some areas require further investigation. Our framing highlights other promising architectures for a retail CBDC.

This paper first describes the Bank of Canada's approach to the design of large-value clearing and settlement systems. It then examines the way the Bank has operated under the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act, passed by Parliament in July 1996.

It has been a difficult year for capital markets professionals. The turmoil has deteriorated into a full-blown financial crisis. Most financial markets have experienced historic falls in prices, and some are strained to the point of closing.

The Rise of Mortgage Finance Companies in Canada: Benefits and Vulnerabilities, by Don Coletti, Marc-André Gosselin and Cameron MacDonald, examines the increased importance of mortgage finance companies (MFCs) in the Canadian mortgage market. The authors discuss the MFC business model, highlighting MFCs’ relationship with mortgage brokers and banks, as well as the benefits they bring to Canadian borrowers. The authors conclude with a discussion of the impact of MFCs on financial system vulnerabilities.

This paper reviews both the theoretical and empirical literature on the impact of common currencies on financial markets and evaluates the first three years of experience with Economic and Monetary Union (EMU).

A variety of technology designs could support retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) systems. We develop five archetypes of CBDC systems, outline their characteristics and discuss their trade-offs. This work serves as a framework to analyze and compare different designs, independent of vendor, platform and implementation.

The author documents some stylized facts about the Canadian financial structure. He explores these empirical facts in the context of Canadian financial legislation and finds that, over the 1990s, Canadian businesses became more heavily dependent on financial markets as their primary source of external funding.

The sharp depreciation of the Canadian dollar and the successful launch of the euro have sparked a lively debate in Canada about the possible benefits of formally adopting the U.S. dollar as our national currency. Some observers have suggested that this debate is largely irrelevant, since Canada is already highly "dollarized." Canadian businesses and households, they assert, often use the U.S. dollar to perform standard money functions in preference to their own currency. Very little evidence has been provided, however, to support these claims. The authors review the available data with a view to drawing some tentative conclusions about the extent to which Canada has already been informally dollarized. The evidence suggests that many of the concerns that have been expressed about the imminent demise of the Canadian dollar have been misplaced. The Canadian dollar continues to be used as the principal unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value within our borders. Moreover, there is no indication that dollarization is likely to take hold in the foreseeable future. Indeed, in many respects, the Canadian economy is less dollarized now than it was 20 years ago.