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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.

The authors examine whether simple measures of Canadian equity and housing price misalignments contain leading information about output growth and inflation.

This paper examines the empirical performance of alternatives to the monetary aggregates currently published by the Bank of Canada. The results show that real M1 and real M1a perform about equally well in providing leading information about real output at short horizons. However, on theoretical grounds, M1a is a more attractive aggregate, since it excludes […]

We are experiencing a commodity super cycle. Throughout the current boom, the scale of price increases has been higher, and the range of affected commodities broader, than in previous upturns. Since 2002, grain and oilseed prices have more than doubled, base metals prices have tripled, and oil prices have quadrupled.

The primary focus of this paper is to study conflict of interest in the brokerage market. Brokers face a conflict of interest when the commissions they receive from investors differ from the costs imposed by different trading venues.

This paper examines the ability of linear and nonlinear models to replicate features of real Canadian GDP. We evaluate the models using various business-cycle metrics.

In an era when the primary policy instrument is the level of the short-term interest rate, a comparison of that rate with some equilibrium rate can be a useful guide for policy and a convenient method to measure the stance of monetary policy.

Financial and monetary variables have long been known to contain useful leading information regarding economic activity. In this paper, the authors wish to determine whether the forecasting performance of such variables can be improved using neural network models. The main findings are that, at the 1-quarter forecasting horizon, neural networks yield no significant forecast improvements. […]

This paper investigates the effect of oil price uncertainty on real economic activity using a quarterly VAR with stochastic volatility in mean. Stochastic volatility allows oil price uncertainty to vary separately from changes in the level of oil prices, and thus the impact of oil price uncertainty can be examined in a more flexible yet tractable way.

In its role as fiscal agent to the government, the Bank of Canada provides analysis and advice on decisions about the government's domestic debt portfolio. Debt-management decisions depend on assumptions about future interest rates, macroeconomic outcomes, and fiscal policy, yet when a debt-strategy decision is taken, none of these factors can be known with certainty. Moreover, the government has various financing options (i.e., treasury bills, nominal bonds, and inflation-linked bonds) to meet its objectives of minimizing debt-service charges while simultaneously ensuring a prudent risk profile and well-functioning government securities markets. Bank of Canada staff have therefore developed a mathematical model to assist in the decision-making process. This article describes the key aspects of the debt manager's challenge and the principal assumptions incorporated in the debt-strategy model, illustrated with specific results.