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Business investment has been lower than expected in Canada and abroad since the financial crisis of 2007–09. This corporate investment gap is mirrored in firms’ other financing decisions, as they have increased cash holdings and dividend payments and decreased issuance of debt and equity.

Combining various high frequency financial data with central bank projections, I construct a new measure of monetary policy shocks not predictable by the public information preceding a central bank’s announcements. I then study the causal effects of monetary policy on the macro economy.

We propose a new strength measure of the global financial cycle by estimating a regime-switching factor model on cross-border equity flows for 61 countries. We then assess how the strength of the global financial cycle affects monetary policy independence, which is defined as the response of central banks' policy interest rates to exogenous changes in inflation.

We present the daily time series of the outstanding amounts of all Government of Canada marketable debt securities from July 2001 to June 2017.

Globally, private credit lending has expanded rapidly and become increasingly connected to the broader financial system. Complex structures, limited transparency and the fact that private credit is untested in a downturn make it difficult to predict how the sector might amplify shocks.

This article provides a broad perspective on the performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States since the Great Recession. It also presents a simple way to summarize much of this information in a single composite labour market indicator (LMI) for both countries. The LMI suggests that the unemployment rate in Canada has evolved largely in line with overall labour market conditions since the recession, but may have modestly overstated the extent of recent improvement. The U.S. unemployment rate, in contrast, appears to have substantially overstated the post-recession improvement in labour market conditions.

We estimate a panel error correction model for loan loss provisions, using unique supervisory data on flow of funds into and out of the allowance for loan losses of 25 Dutch banks in the post-2008 crisis period. We find that these banks aim for an allowance of 49% of impaired loans.

In this note, I use two multivariate frequency filtering approaches to characterize the Canadian financial cycle by capturing fluctuations in the underlying variables with respect to a long-term trend. The first approach is a dynamically weighted composite, and the second is a stochastic cycle model.

Gosselin examines and reports on the various factors that contribute to successful inflation targeting. Using a panel of 21 inflation-targeting countries over the period 1990Q1-2007Q2, Gosselin finds that the ability of central banks to hit their targets varies considerably. Some of these differences can be explained by exchange rate fluctuations, fiscal deficits, and differences in financial development. Others are explained by differences in the targeting framework itself and the manner in which it is implemented.

Deputy Governor Agathe Côté discusses the importance of inflation expectations for monetary policy and a new survey the Bank of Canada created to monitor household expectations.