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For central banks, conducting policy in an environment of uncertainty is a daily fact of life. This uncertainty can take many forms, ranging from incomplete knowledge of the correct economic model and data to future economic and geopolitical events whose precise magnitudes and effects cannot be known with certainty.

We quantify the effects of large-scale stock purchases by a central bank and compare these to bond purchases. We find that the central bank’s equity purchases would lower the risk and term premiums on stocks and long-term bonds, respectively, and thereby stimulate economic activity.

This report provides a detailed technical description of a stress test model for investment funds called Ceto.

The 2002 Bank of Canada Conference focused on price adjustment, a critically important issue for monetary policy. Given the acceptance throughout the 1990s and 2000s of the existence of price stickiness in goods or labour markets, or both, and of the important role that monetary policy can play in an economy, the time was right for a conference that would focus on current developments in this area of research, particularly within a Canadian context. Conference papers covering both theoretical and empirical studies explored such themes as sources of the persistence of inflation, forward-looking models of inflation, models of inflation in open economies, the macroeconomic effects of technology shocks, and models of the interaction between wages, prices, and real economic outcomes.

The secular decline in real interest rates has created a challenge for monetary policy, now confronting the zero lower bound more often. An increase in the supply of safe assets reduces downward pressure on the natural interest rate. This allows monetary policy to reach price stability and full employment, but not without cost—permanently lower investment.

Many derivatives markets use collateral requirements calculated with industry-standard but dated methods that are not designed with systemic risk in mind. This paper explores whether the conservative nature of conventional collateral requirements outweighs their lack of consideration of systemic risk.

We assess the response of Government of Canada bond yields to the Bank of Canada’s initial announcement of the Government Bond Purchase Program (GBPP) as well as to the Bank’s later GBPP purchase operations.

We show that a large share of low-frequency (quarterly) movements in Canadian government bond yields can be explained by macroeconomic news, even though high-frequency (daily) changes are driven by other shocks. Furthermore, we show that US macro news—not domestic news— explains most of the quarterly variation in Canadian bond yields.

Do tariffs affect exchange rates? We look at President Trump’s tweets during talks on the North American Free Trade Agreement and find that anticipation of higher tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico led to an appreciation of the US dollar relative to Canadian and Mexican currency.