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Dealers connect investors who want to buy or sell securities in financial markets. Over time, dealers and investors form trading networks to save time and resources. An emerging field of research investigates how networks form.

In the 1970s and 1980s we found - in common with many other countries - that high and variable rates of inflation created a lot of economic damage. And it took a long time and a lot of work with various monetary policy frameworks before we got back on track.

As the title of the conference suggests, we have seen many boom-and-bust cycles in the commodity sector. This raises one obvious and central question: How can we avoid them in the future?

The Governing Council judges that the risks to the Canadian financial system have decreased somewhat relative to the December FSR, but that the overall level of risk remains high. The key risks are similar to those highlighted in December, and emanate primarily from the external environment.

We examine systemic risks within the Canadian banking sector, decomposing them into three contribution channels: contagion, common exposures, and idiosyncratic risk. Through a structural model, we dissect how interbank relationships and market conditions contribute to systemic risk, providing new insights for financial stability.

Understanding the size of sectoral links is crucial to predicting the impact of a crisis on the whole economy. We show that statistical learning techniques substantially outperform traditional estimation techniques when measuring large networks of these links.

We estimate a model of households in Norway with bequest motives, health-dependent utility, and uncertain longevity and health. Our estimates imply strong bequest motives for households both with and without offspring. We interpret this as suggestive evidence that utility from residual wealth represents forces beyond an altruistic bequest motive.

Risks to the stability of both the Canadian and the global financial systems appeared to be diminishing for most of the period since the last Financial System Review (FSR), as the recovery in financial conditions and the macroeconomic environment continued to solidify.

FSR Highlights - June 2010

Many decentralized markets are able to attain a stable outcome despite the absence of a central authority (Roth and Vande Vate, 1990). A stable matching, however, need not be efficient if preferences are weak. This raises the question whether a decentralized market with weak preferences can attain Pareto efficiency in the absence of a central matchmaker.

In a competitive sales environment, merchants are compelled to offer consumers the option of paying for goods and services using a variety of payment methods, including cash, debit card, or credit card. Each method entails different costs and benefits to merchants. To better understand the costs of accepting retail payments, the Bank of Canada surveyed over 500 Canadian merchants and found that most consider cash the least costly. This article investigated this perception by calculating the variable costs per transaction of accepting different means of payment. The findings are that costs for each payment method vary by merchant and transaction value, with debit cards the least costly payment for a broad cross-section of merchants.