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Over the past several years, the Bank for International Settlements has noted that Canada’s credit-to-GDP gap has widened and is above thresholds indicating future banking stress.

The dramatic reduction in global demand, and the decline in the spot price of crude oil in the second half of last year, may have significant implications for the future supply of oil. Investments in conventional methods of extraction have been constrained, since easily accessible oil reserves are typically concentrated in countries with geopolitical uncertainty and/or state-run oil companies.

Canada’s Short-Term Indicator (CSI) is a new model that exploits the information content of 32 indicators to produce daily updates to forecasts of quarterly real GDP growth. The model is a data-intensive, judgment-free approach to short-term forecasting. While CSI’s forecasts at the start of the quarter are not very accurate, the model’s accuracy increases appreciably as more information becomes available. CSI is the latest addition to a wide range of models and information sources that the Bank of Canada uses, combined with expert judgment, to produce its short-term forecasts.

We document that the structure of syndicates affects loan renegotiations. Lead banks with large retained shares have positive effects on renegotiations. In contrast, more diverse syndicates deter renegotiations, but only for credit lines.

Offline functionality is a key consideration for a potential CBDC. We describe the different types of offline functionality based on their duration outside of network connection—either intermittent (for short periods) or extended (for longer periods). We discuss the advantages and drawbacks of each and consider implications for end-user devices, system resilience and universal accessibility.

Using a closed-economy model, Jensen (2002) and Walsh (2003) have, respectively, shown that a policy regime that optimally targets nominal income growth (NIT) or the change in the output gap (SLT) outperforms a regime that targets inflation, because NIT and SLT induce more inertia in the actions of the central bank, effectively replicating the outcome obtained under precommitment. The author obtains a very different result when the analysis is extended to open-economy models.

Would a shift in trading in fixed-income markets—from over the counter (bilateral trading) to a centralized electronic platform—improve welfare? We use trade-level data on the secondary market for Government of Canada debt to answer this question.

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a detailed social accounting matrix (SAM), which incorporates the income and financial flows into the standard input-output matrix, for the Canadian economy for 2004.

The substantial growth in wealth over the course of the second half of the 1990s generated the equivalent of a certain level of savings, while simultaneously causing household savings rates to fall significantly. The author seeks to explain this decline in savings, observed since 1995, using the methodology developed by King, Plosser, Stock, and Watson (1991).

In recent years, the Canadian economy has been affected by strong movements in relative prices brought about by the surging costs of energy and non-energy commodities, with significant implications for the terms of trade, the exchange rate, and the allocation of resources across Canadian sectors and regions.