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How much of a CBDC would Canadian households want to hold, and what design features of a CBDC would they care about?

We discuss the competition and innovation arguments for issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC). A CBDC could be an effective competition policy tool for payments. A CBDC could also support the vibrancy of the digital economy. It could help solve market failures and foster competition and innovation in new digital payments markets.

The five articles in this issue present research and analysis by Bank staff covering a variety of topics: the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves; the emergence of platform-based digital currencies; methods of forecasting the real price of oil; measures of uncertainty in monetary policy; and the recent performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States.

Causes and consequences of declining inflation persistence in Canada; the evolution of capital flows to emerging-market economies (EMEs) and the need for EMEs to implement policies that support capital flows; making bank notes accessible for Canadians living with blindness or low vision, sharing assessments of the suite of accessibility features on the current series of bank notes and plans for the next series.

When financial system vulnerabilities are elevated, they can give rise to asymmetric risks to the economic outlook. To illustrate this, I consider the economic outlook presented in the Bank of Canada’s October 2017 Monetary Policy Report in the context of two key financial system vulnerabilities: high levels of household indebtedness and housing market imbalances.

This paper introduces a subjective measure of cash accessibility in Canada, complementing existing distance-based metrics developed by Chen, O’Habib and Xiao (2023). Analyzing data from the 2023 Methods-of-Payment Survey, this study explores how Canadians perceive their ease of accessing cash from automated banking machines (ABMs) and financial institution branches.

We introduce a history of macroprudential policy (MPP) events in Canada since the 1980s. We document the short-run effects of MPP announcements on market-based measures of systemic risk and find that MPPs can influence the market’s perception of large banks’ resilience.

These past few months have been busy for central bankers, to say the least, and the past few days are certainly no exception. While developments on Wall Street have garnered much attention, the cost of living has also been an issue for us all, whether we're buying gas at the pumps, booking an airline ticket, or just picking up a loaf of bread at the grocery store.

Central banks must cope with considerable uncertainty about what will happen in the economy when formulating monetary policy. This article describes the different types of uncertainty that arise and looks at examples of uncertainty that the Bank has recently encountered. It then reviews the strategies employed by the Bank to deal with this problem. The other articles in this special issue focus on three of these major strategies.

This paper provides an extensive evaluation of the performance of quantile vector autoregression (QVAR) to forecast macroeconomic risk. Generally, QVAR outperforms standard benchmark models. Moreover, QVAR and QVAR augmented with factors perform equally well. Both are adequate for modeling macroeconomic risks.