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This issue of the Financial System Review reflects the Bank’s judgment that the high level of household indebtedness and housing market imbalances remain the most important vulnerabilities. While these vulnerabilities are still elevated, improving economic conditions and recent changes to housing policy should support an easing of these vulnerabilities over time. A third vulnerability highlighted in the FSR concerns cyber threats and the interconnectedness of the financial system.

In this study, we enhance Markowitz portfolio selection with graph theory for the analysis of two portfolios composed of either EU or US assets. Using a threshold-based decomposition of their respective covariance matrices, we perturb the level of risk in each portfolio and build the corresponding sets of graphs.

Using U.S. county-level data from 1990 to 2010, we study the causal impact of immigration on the provision of local public goods. We uncover substantial heterogeneity across immigrants with different skills and immigrants of different generations, which leads to unequal fiscal effects across U.S. counties.

Using the quantum Monte Carlo algorithm, we study whether quantum computing can improve the run time of economic applications and challenges in doing so. We apply the algorithm to two models: a stress testing bank model and a DSGE model solved with deep learning. We also present innovations in the algorithm and benchmark it to classical Monte Carlo.

Deputy Governor Nicolas Vincent discusses how firms set their prices and how pricing behaviour changed in our recent environment of high inflation.

This paper explores how the Canadian futures market contributed to banks’ systemic risk during the 2008 financial crisis. It finds that core banks as a whole traded against the periphery, in this way increasing their risk of simultaneous losses.

This paper examines the reliability of survey data on business incomes, valuations, and rates of return, which are key inputs for studies of wealth inequality and entrepreneurial choice.

Digital payments and decentralized systems enable the creation of new financial products and services for users. One core challenge in digital payments is the need to protect users from fraud and abuse while retaining privacy in individual transactions. We propose a pseudonymous credential scheme for use in payment systems to tackle this problem.

Governor Tiff Macklem discusses how structural change—driven by U.S. protectionism, AI, and slowing population growth—is reshaping Canada’s economy. He outlines the Bank’s role in maintaining low and stable inflation while helping the economy through the transition.

This article reviews recent work that uses principal-component analysis to extract information common to indicators from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey (BOS). The authors use correlation analysis and an out-of-sample forecasting exercise to assess and compare the information content of the principal component with that of responses to key individual survey questions on growth in real gross domestic product and in real business investment. Results suggest that summarizing the common movements among BOS indicators may provide useful information for forecasting near-term growth in business investment. For growth in real gross domestic product, however, the survey’s balance of opinion on future sales growth appears to be more informative.