Search

Deputy Governor Tim Lane discusses monetary policy decision making and how the Bank assesses the underlying trend in inflation.

Results in the first quarter of 2023 show that consumer expectations for inflation one to two years ahead fell but remain elevated, particularly for services. Consumers, especially indebted households and equity-deserving groups, are facing financial pressures and limits on their spending due to high inflation and increasing interest rates. Consumers expect to spend less on discretionary services, such as travelling and eating out. Canadians continue to anticipate a recession in the next 12 months. Many are uncertain about where the economy and job markets are going. Despite this, workers still see the labour market as strong and expect wage growth to increase.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn Wilkins discusses key issues involved in the Governing Council’s deliberations about the policy rate decision and the MPR.

Good afternoon, Mr. Chairman and committee members. Senior Deputy Governor Wilkins and I are happy to be before you today. It is our normal practice to appear before this committee twice a year to discuss the Bank’s Monetary Policy Report (MPR). We published our latest MPR last week and are happy to answer questions about […]

Governor Mark Carney discusses financial system reform in a speech to the Canadian Club of Montréal.

Productivity plays a critical role when it comes to our national standard of living. Productivity growth is the main element that contributes to continued improvements in real incomes and overall prosperity. Rising productivity lets businesses pay higher wages, while keeping costs down, employment high, and profits coming in. That's why economists like me spend a lot of time thinking about ways to improve the productivity of our economy.

At the Bank of Canada, we have worked hard over the past several years to define our goals and our methods for achieving them. We have continued to strengthen our monetary policy framework, and we have established priorities in all areas of our operations to help us meet our strategic objectives. In 2002, the Bank set out a medium-term plan for the period 2003–05. The plan’s clearly defined policy frameworks and priorities were critical in guiding our analysis and our decisions in 2003, a year in which Canadians across the country were affected by a number of severe and unanticipated events.

Security prices contain valuable information that can be used to make a wide variety of economic decisions. To extract this information, a model is required that relates market prices to the desired information, and that ideally can be implemented using timely and low-cost methods.

The Bank of Canada launched the Bankers’ Acceptance Purchase Facility (BAPF) to ensure that the bankers’ acceptance (BA) market could continue to function well during the financial crisis induced by the COVID‑19 pandemic. We review the impact that the announcement of this facility had on BA yields in the secondary market. We find that BA yield spreads declined by 15 basis points on the day of the announcement and by up to 70 basis points over a longer period. Using an econometric framework, we quantify the effect of the announcement and confirm early assertions presented in the Bank’s 2020 Financial System Review.

The growth rates of both aggregate factor and labour productivity in Canada fell substantially during the period 1975-83. This paper examines this phenomenon and reviews a number of possible explanations for it. First, the productivity growth slowdown is examined at various levels of industry disaggregation. It is apparent from this analysis that the slowdown varied […]