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In our Financial System Review, we identify the main vulnerabilities and risks to financial stability in Canada and explain how they have evolved over the past year. This issue reflects the Bank’s judgment that the vulnerabilities associated with high household debt and imbalances in the housing market have declined modestly but remain significant. The Financial System Review is a product of the Governing Council of the Bank of Canada: Stephen S. Poloz, Carolyn A. Wilkins, Timothy Lane, Lawrence Schembri, Lynn Patterson and Paul Beaudry.

The Canadian economy is expected to grow by 1.6 per cent in 2013, 2.3 per cent in 2014 and 2.6 per cent in 2015, and to reach full production capacity around the end of 2015.

Our stress-testing tool considers banks under stress that can strategically manage their balance sheets. Using confidential Canadian supervisory data, we assess whether bank behaviour to maximize shareholder value can amplify a hypothetical stress scenario.

Since 1997 when the Bank of Canada last published a review of the Canadian overnight market, several important changes have affected the market's structure and dynamics. Reid provides a current overview of the market, examining the financial instruments, market transparency and flows, and the collateralized overnight rate as it has evolved since the introduction of the Large Value Transfer System and the fixed announcement dates. Other significant influences include changes in market practices regarding risk management, the rise of securities lending, the increased demand for collateral, and the Bank of Canada's measures to reinforce the target for the overnight rate.

Growth in the Canadian economy is projected to reach 2.8 per cent this year before slowing to 2.0 per cent next year and 1.6 per cent in 2019.

We study the cross-section of equilibrium returns on safe assets using a tractable asset pricing model with a micro-founded demand for liquidity and multiple safe assets with heterogeneous transaction costs. We test the main predictions of our theory using a novel measure of relative (in)convenience yields in the US Treasury market.

Existing home sales’ share of Canada’s economic pie has been rising in recent years, and variation around this trend has resulted in outsized contributions to changes in real gross domestic product (GDP). In this context, we use a cointegration framework to estimate the level of resale activity across the Canadian provinces that is supported by fundamentals—namely, full-time employment, housing affordability and migration flows—to help look through the volatility.

Canada’s financial system is resilient. Overall, households, businesses, banks and non-bank financial intermediaries successfully weathered the pandemic, a period of elevated inflation, and sharp increases in interest rates. But the trade war currently threatens the Canadian economy and poses risks to financial stability.

Bank regulation presumes risks spill over more easily from large banks to the banking system than vice versa. Interestingly, we observe this is not the case. We find that the capacity to transmit risk is larger in the system-to-bank direction, leading to an increased default risk.

This volume explores money and the role it has played, and continues to play, in society, through the lens of Canada's National Currency Collection. The Collection is an extraordinary repository of coins, bank notes, and related paraphernalia from around the world. Soft cover, 124 pages (2008).