Search

G-20 representatives, academics, market participants, and members of international financial institutions were brought together in Ottawa to explore the connection between robust financial markets and economic growth and development, share experiences, and to develop policy recommendations, where possible. Participants identified several areas they deemed critical for fostering strong domestic financial markets and reducing external vulnerability: sound macroeconomics policies, strengthened financial infrastructures and banking systems, and exchange rate flexibility for countries with widely open capital accounts. Papers presented in the six sessions and keynote address highlighted a number of issues, including currency mismatches, the sequence of financial liberalization and supervisory reforms, the development of local financial markets, infrastructure building and governance, and appropriate incentives.

The uncertainty around future changes to the Federal Reserve target rate varies over time. In our results, the main driver of uncertainty is a “path” factor signaling information about future policy actions, which is filtered from federal funds futures data.

Consumers, businesses and banks make millions of payments each day using a variety of instruments, such as debit cards, cheques and wires. Canada is currently developing three new systems to process these transactions: Lynx, Settlement Optimization Engine (SOE) and Real-Time Rail (RTR).

The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Canadian financial institutions offered debt-relief programs to help borrowers cope with job losses and economic insecurity. We consider the low take-up rates for these programs and suggest that to be effective, such programs must be visible and easy to use.

We develop a discrete-time affine stochastic volatility model with time-varying conditional skewness (SVS). Importantly, we disentangle the dynamics of conditional volatility and conditional skewness in a coherent way.

This paper explores the reliability of using prices of credit default swap contracts (CDS) as indicators of default probabilities during the 2007/2008 financial crisis.

This survey took place between August 2 and August 23, 2022. Follow-up interviews took place in September. Expectations for inflation one to two years ahead have continued to rise because consumers anticipate supply chain disruptions and elevated oil prices will persist. In contrast, expectations for inflation five years ahead have eased to near pre-pandemic levels. Still, consumers are more divided this quarter about where inflation will end up in the long term.

ToTEM III is the most recent generation of the Bank of Canada’s main dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model for projection and policy analysis. The model helps Bank staff tell clear and coherent stories about the Canadian economy’s current state and future evolution.

This paper examines the behaviour of the Canadian dollar from 1997 to 1999 to see if there is any evidence of excess volatility or significant overshooting. A small econometric model of the exchange rate, based on market fundamentals, is presented and used to make tentative judgments about the extent to which the currency might have been systematically over- or undervalued.