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How should policy be designed at high debt levels, when fiscal authorities have little room to adjust taxes? Assigning the monetary authority a role in achieving debt sustainability makes it less effective in stabilizing inflation and output.

Since last summer, many of us here today have been preoccupied with the ongoing dislocations in financial markets. What began in securities linked to U.S. subprime mortgages has spread to a broad range of structured assets, conventional credit markets, and, to a lesser extent, equities.

Recent years have witnessed the advances of e-money systems such as Bitcoin, PayPal and various forms of stored-value cards. This paper adopts a mechanism design approach to identify some essential features of different payment systems that implement and improve the constrained optimal resource allocation.

This article examines the incentives for banks to hold various assets on their balance sheets for use as collateral when the opportunity cost of doing so can be high. Focusing on the five-year period (2002-07) that preceded the financial crisis, it examines the choices made by financial institutions among the assets that are pledged as collateral in Canada's Large Value Transfer System. This serves as a baseline for collateral-management practices during relatively normal times. The results of this study are important for policy-makers, especially the Bank of Canada, which is concerned both about the efficient functioning of fixed-income markets and about the credit risk it ultimately bears in insuring LVTS settlement. The results suggest that relative market liquidity and market-making capacity are important factors in the choice of securities pledged as collateral in the LVTS.

We document a new empirical finding in the foreign exchange market: currency returns show systematic reversals around the benchmark fixings. Specifically, the US dollar, on average, appreciates in the hours before fixes and depreciates after fixes.

There have been positive developments in the global financial system since the June Financial System Review, in part reflecting some encouraging signs about the global economy. At the same time, significant vulnerabilities remain. The Governing Council judges that the overall risk to the stability of Canada’s financial system has decreased from “high” to “elevated” over the past six months.

This paper examines the business cycle linkages that propagate industry-specific business cycle shocks throughout the economy in a way that (sometimes) generates aggregated cycles. The transmission of sectoral business cycles is modelled through a multivariate Markov-switching model, which is estimated by Gibbs sampling.

We provide empirical evidence on the impact of oil supply shocks on global aggregates. To do this, we first extract structural oil supply shocks from a standard oil-price determination model found in the literature.

How might one simulate a million realistic income paths and compute their statistical moments in under a second? Using CUDA-based methods to estimate the Canadian earnings process, I find that the distribution of labour income growth is sharply peaked with heavy tails—similar to that in the United States.

With your professional interests in foreign exchange, money markets, capital markets, and derivatives, I'm sure the past year and a half has been exciting and interesting – if those are the right words. We've been living through a period of astonishing financial turbulence, historic marketplace losses, and serious threats to financial stability.