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Deputy Governor Timothy Lane discusses the benefits and challenges of international capital mobility.

When a bank holds a lot of safe assets, it is well situated to deal with funding stress. But when all banks hold a lot of safe assets, a pecuniary externality implies that their (wholesale) funding costs increase. This reduces banks’ ability to hold capital buffers and thus, paradoxically, increases the frequency of funding stress.

The Bank of Canada considers a wide range of information and analysis before making a monetary policy decision and uses carefully articulated models to produce economic projections and to examine alternative scenarios. This article describes an ongoing research agenda at the Bank to develop models in which financial variables play an active role in the transmission of monetary policy actions to economic activity. Such models can help to analyze information from the financial side of the economy and to provide an overall view of the implications of financial developments for the current economic outlook. The authors also explain how this research can help address other issues relevant to the objectives of monetary policy, including how asset-price movements should be taken into account in the monetary policy framework.

One of the most important factors that must be considered if countries are thinking about lowering the target level of inflation much below 2 per cent is the zero interest bound. Targeting inflation rates that are too low, the authors note, may restrict the ability of monetary policy to respond to economic shocks by limiting the amount by which interest rates can be eased.

Bank of Canada liquidity actions in response to the financial market turmoil; understanding corporate bond spreads using credit default swaps; review of the conflicts of interest between participants in the securitization process highlighting the most recent policy measures and potential solutions for ameliorating these agency issues.

During and after the Great Recession of 2008–09, conventional monetary policy in the United States and many other advanced economies was constrained by the effective lower bound (ELB) on nominal interest rates. Several central banks implemented large-scale asset purchase (LSAP) programs, more commonly known as quantitative easing or QE, to provide additional monetary stimulus.

The ongoing process of price discovery in foreign exchange markets provides valuable information to certain market participants. Recent empirical findings suggest that aggregate measures of order flow convey information about the fundamental value of the exchange rate. Using a market microstructure approach, D'Souza reports on a two-year study of completed transactions within the Canadian and Australian exchange rate markets to examine the relationship between exchange rate returns and trades initiated in different locations. Based on the information content of the trades, he finds that geographic location and hours of operation are two of the factors driving informed interdealer trading.

Latency delays—known as “speed bumps”—are an intentional slowing of order flow by exchanges. Supporters contend that delays protect market makers from high-frequency arbitrage, while opponents warn that delays promote “quote fading” by market makers. We construct a model of informed trading in a fragmented market, where one market operates a conventional order book and the other imposes a latency delay on market orders.

Weather-related disasters can reduce output while increasing inflation, creating difficult trade-offs for monetary policy. This note reviews evidence on the macroeconomic effects of physical climate risks and uses a structural model to assess how more frequent and severe disasters could shape future monetary policy challenges.

We construct a 23-country panel data set to consider the effect of central bank projections and forward guidance on private-sector forecast disagreement. We find that central bank projections and forward guidance matter mainly for private-sector forecast disagreement surrounding upcoming policy rate decisions and matter less for private-sector macroeconomic forecasts.