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The Bank of Canada recently developed an asset-liability-matching model to aid in the management of Canada’s foreign exchange reserves. The model allows policy-makers at the Bank and the Department of Finance to analyze asset-allocation and funding-mix decisions by quantifying both the risk-return and liquidity trade-offs for the assets, as well as the risk-cost trade-offs of the funding liabilities.

The investment of foreign exchange reserves or other asset portfolios requires an assessment of the credit quality of counterparties. Traditionally, foreign exchange reserve managers and other investors have relied on credit rating agencies (CRAs) as the main source for credit assessments.

Over the last 30 years, the business mix of banks in Canada has changed significantly. Progress in information-processing technology, legislative changes, and market forces have combined to blur the traditional distinctions between banks and other financial institutions and have allowed banks to offer a much wider range of products and services. In this article, the author reviews the expansion of bank lending to households over this period and their recent movement into personal wealth management. While these trends were facilitated by revisions to legislation, they also reflected the changing needs of the "baby boom" generation, first as home-buyers and, more recently, as middle-aged investors. On the commercial and corporate side, banks reacted to the rapid expansion of securities markets (and to the reduced demand for intermediation by both lenders/depositors and borrowers) by moving into investment banking, after legislative changes opened this business to them in the late 1980s. They also used their expertise in credit assessment and risk management to provide credit guarantees and to act as counterparties and intermediaries in derivatives markets. Notable in this broadening of bank activities has been their more recent entry into the trust, mutual fund, and retail brokerage business. The banks have also made preliminary forays into insurance. The expansion of off-balance-sheet activities has made fee income an increasingly important part of bank earnings. The article also looks at the emerging tools and techniques that will most likely transform the structure of banking in the future.

This Report presents the Bank of Canada’s assessment of the trend of inflation in Canada and explains the monetary policy actions deemed necessary to keep inflation within the Bank’s inflation-control target range.

This note presents Segmented Inflation Dynamics (SID), a data-driven tool for assessing trend inflation. SID uses time-series segmentation to divide the price index into contiguous segments with stable inflation rates. Based on data through December 2025, SID indicates that Canada’s trend inflation has been near 2 percent since early 2024.

The Bank of Canada and the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions (OSFI) today announced plans for a pilot project to use climate-change scenarios to better understand the risks to the financial system related to a transition to a low-carbon economy.

Deputy Governor Timothy Lane explains how the Bank of Canada is preparing for a future where Canadians may need a digital currency issued by their central bank.

As Canada continues to engage in a dialogue to develop the approach to modernizing its core payment systems, we analyze the core payment systems that exist in countries around the world. We study payment systems in 27 jurisdictions, encompassing a broad range of geographic regions, through three levels of analysis.

Governor Tiff Macklem talks about the conduct of monetary policy in the context of COVID-19.

This article summarizes the proceedings of a conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in November 1999. Three major themes emerged at the conference. The first concerned uncertainty about the transmission mechanism by which monetary policy affects output and inflation. The second concerned the potential usefulness of monetary aggregates in guiding the economy along a stable non-inflationary growth path. The third was the recent developments in dynamic monetary general-equilibrium models. The work presented suggests that a wide range of models is useful for understanding the various paths by which monetary policy actions might influence the economy.