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Digital currencies have attracted strong interest in recent years and have the potential to become widely adopted for use in making payments. Public authorities and central banks around the world are closely monitoring developments in digital currencies and studying their implications for the economy, the financial system and central banks.

During the period of 2008 to 2012, the rules for government-backed mortgage insurance were tightened on four occasions. In this note, we estimate the effects through a simple econometric exercise using a vector error-correction model (VECM).

Commentary and technical data relating to the 2006 target renewal.

This paper studies the business model choice between running a cash platform and a token platform, as well as its welfare and policy implications.

Walsh's paper highlights many useful lessons that can be learned from the conventional framework and its various extensions. However, the financial crisis provides a stark and costly reminder of just how incomplete the standard model is.

This article examines another strategy in the Bank's approach to dealing with an uncertain world: the use of carefully articulated models to produce economic forecasts and to examine the implications of the various risks to those forecasts. Economic models are deliberate simplifications of a complex world that allow economists to make predictions that are reasonably accurate and that can be easily understood and communicated. By using several models, based on competing paradigms, the Bank minimizes policy errors that could result from relying on one view of the world and one philosophy of model design. The authors review some of the models currently used at the Bank, as well as the role of judgment in the projection process.

This paper studies the rapid increase since 2019 of Government of Canada (GoC) debt issuance alongside greater hedge fund participation at GoC bond auctions. We find a systematic relationship between GoC debt stock and hedge fund bidding shares at auction.

As the Government of Canada’s fiscal agent, the Bank of Canada provides strategic policy advice on the management of the government’s debt, in addition to being responsible for conducting debt-management operations. In this article, the authors review the evolution of the debt strategy over the past 20 years and outline the complex process of developing a sound strategy that balances various cost and risk considerations. This includes an examination of the tools and practices used to develop the new medium-term debt-management strategy, such as the modelling approach involved, market consultations and various debt-management metrics.

This paper reviews the Canadian and international evidence of the effectiveness of macroprudential policy measures in building resilience and mitigating financial imbalances. The analysis concludes that these measures have broadly achieved their goal of increasing the overall resilience of the financial system to the buildup of imbalances and increasing the financial system’s ability to withstand adverse shocks.

Starting with the winter 2007–08 survey, the results of two additional questions became included in the Business Outlook Survey (BOS) publication: the balance of opinion on past sales and the balance of opinion on credit conditions. This backgrounder briefly describes the two questions and presents the correlations between the responses and relevant economic data.