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This paper introduces a new methodology to date systemic financial stress events in a transparent, objective and reproducible way. The financial cycle is captured by a monthly country-specific financial stress index.

The authors present the four common cyclical vulnerabilities that appear in financial systems, providing examples of qualitative and quantitative indicators used to monitor these vulnerabilities across different sectors. They also discuss other inputs to the vulnerability assessment and to the internal process used at the Bank of Canada for identifying, evaluating and communicating vulnerabilities and risks, and highlight some of the key challenges in assessing financial system vulnerabilities and risks.

Freedman and Engert focus on the changing pattern of lending and borrowing in Canada in the past thirty to forty years, including the types of financial instruments used and the relative roles of financial institutions and financial markets. They examine how borrowing mechanisms have changed over time and consider the challenges facing the Canadian financial sector, including whether our financial markets are in danger of disappearing because of the size and pre-eminence of U.S. financial markets. Some of the trends examined here include syndicated lending, securitization, and credit derivatives, a form of financial engineering that has become increasingly important in the last few years. They also study bond and equity markets to determine whether Canadian capital markets have been hollowed out or abandoned by Canadian firms and conclude that the data do not provide much support for that view.

This note uses Charbonneau and Landry’s (2018) framework to assess the direct impact of the current trade tensions on the Canadian and global economies, as well as possible implications if the conflict escalates further. Overall, my findings show that the estimated impact of current tariffs on real gross domestic product (GDP) remains relatively small, which is in line with the literature on gains from trade, but the impact on trade is much larger.

Central banks play a pivotal role in well-functioning payments systems by providing liquidity via collateralized lending. This article discusses the role of collateral and haircut policy in central bank lending, as well as the distinguishing features of the central bank’s policy relative to private sector practices. It presents a model that explicitly incorporates the unique role of central banks in the payments system and argues that central banks must consider how their haircut policies affect the relative price and liquidity of assets, the market’s asset allocation, and the likelihood of participants to default. Furthermore, under extraordinary circumstances, there is a rationale for the central bank to temporarily reduce haircuts or broaden the list of eligible collateral to mitigate the shortage of liquidity in the market.

In this paper, we estimate the effect on housing prices of the expansion of the Vancouver SkyTrain rapid transit network during the period 2001–11. We extend the canonical residential sorting equilibrium framework to include commuting time in the household utility function.

We assess whether more central clearing would enhance the resilience of Canadian fixed-income markets. Our analysis estimates the potential benefits of balance sheet netting under scenarios where central clearing is expanded to new participants.

We investigate the risks and opportunities to the mandates of central banks arising from fintech developments.

This paper develops a travel-based metric to measure Canadians’ access to cash from automated banking machines (ABMs) and financial institution branches. We find that, overall, access to cash remained stable between 2019 and 2022. The total number of ABMs in Canada increased by 3.7% and the total number of branches decreased by 5.2% during that period.

Coletti and Lalonde compare inflation targeting and price-level targeting in the context of a small open economy subject to sizable terms-of-trade shocks. The authors summarize recent research that compares the ability of price-level targeting and inflation targeting to stabilize the macroeconomy when confronted with shocks similar to those experienced by Canada in recent years. Their preliminary results suggest that price-level targeting may represent a feasible alternative to traditional inflation targeting. Their article also provides insight into the direction of current research in this area at the Bank.