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Over the recent period, many emerging-market economies and commodity-exporting nations have experienced unprecedented growth and accumulated substantial amounts of foreign exchange reserves. The management of these foreign reserves has led to the emergence of important financial actors: sovereign wealth funds (SWFs).

The Governing Council judges that the risks to the Canadian financial system have decreased somewhat relative to the December FSR, but that the overall level of risk remains high. The key risks are similar to those highlighted in December, and emanate primarily from the external environment.

Investors who trade based on good research are said to be the backbone of stock markets: They conduct research to discover the value of stocks and, through their trading, guide financial prices to reflect true value. What can make their job difficult is that high-speed, short-term traders could use machine learning and other technologies to infer when informed investors are trading.

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.

The world needs an international institution to promote a new monetary order—a well-functioning, market-based global financial system. This will be the subject of my remarks today.

This paper studies the choice between general and specific human capital. A trade-off arises because general human capital, while less productive, can easily be reallocated across firms.

Most central banks effect changes to their target or policy rate in discrete increments (e.g., multiples of 0.25%) following public announcements on scheduled dates. Still, for most applications, researchers rely on the assumption that the policy rate changes linearly with economic conditions and they do not distinguish between dates with and without scheduled announcements.

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.