Search

We introduce limited information in monetary policy. Agents receive signals from the central bank revealing new information (“news") about the future evolution of the policy rate before changes in the rate actually take place. However, the signal is disturbed by noise.

This paper evaluates the effects of high-frequency uncertainty shocks on a set of low-frequency macroeconomic variables that are representative of the U.S. economy. Rather than estimating models at the same common low-frequency, we use recently developed econometric models, which allows us to deal with data of different sampling frequencies.

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.

In March 2020, the Bank of Canada implemented the Government of Canada Bond Purchase Program, eventually purchasing approximately $340 billion of government bonds. In this paper, we analyze the impact of this program on financial market prices and yields as well as on GDP and inflation.

Central counterparties can make over-the-counter markets more resilient and reduce systemic risk by mitigating and managing counterparty credit risk. These benefits are maximized when access to central counterparties is available to a wide range of market participants. In an over-the-counter market, there is an important trade-off between risk and competition. A model of an over-the-counter market shows how risk and competition could be influenced by the incentives of market participants as they move to central clearing. In a centrally cleared market, there may be less risk when participation is high. This helps to explain why regulators have put in place requirements for fair, open and risk-based access criteria.

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.

A blockchain is a digital ledger that keeps track of a record of ownership without the need for a designated party to update and enforce changes to the record. The updating of the ledger is done directly by the users of the blockchain and is traditionally governed by a proof-of-work (PoW) protocol.

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada’s Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults posted on the Bank of Canada’s website that now is updated in partnership with the Bank of England.

Using simulations of the Bank of Canada’s projection model, we assess inflation risks from greater supply-shock volatility and show that monetary policy faces sharper trade-offs, as stabilizing inflation increasingly comes at the cost of weaker real activity.