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The official consumer price index (CPI) inflation measure, based on a fixed basket set before the COVID 19 pandemic, may not fully reflect what consumers are currently experiencing. We partnered with Statistics Canada to construct a more representative index for the pandemic with weights based on real-time transaction and survey data.

Raising liquidity when funding is stressed creates pressure on the financial market. Liquidating large quantities of assets depresses their prices and may amplify funding shocks. How do banks weathering a funding crisis contribute to contagion risk?

Central banks continuously strive to improve how they communicate to financial markets and the public in order to increase transparency. For this reason, many central banks have begun to include guidance on the policy rate in the form of forward-looking statements in their communications. This article examines the debate over the usefulness of providing such statements from both theoretical and empirical standpoints. The evidence presented here suggests that the use of forward-looking statements in Bank of Canada communications has made the Bank more predictable, but not necessarily more transparent.

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.

This issue features four articles that present research and analysis by Bank staff. The first focuses on reforming the international monetary system; the second on the role of collateral and haircut policy in central bank lending; and the third on the extraction of information from the Business Outlook Survey using principal-component analysis. The fourth reviews studies that model the counterfeiting of bank notes.

I develop a population-based Markov chain Monte Carlo algorithm known as parallel tempering to estimate dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models. Parallel tempering approximates the posterior distribution of interest using a family of Markov chains with tempered posteriors.

This paper shows that survey expectations can be used to uncover how households subjectively think about inflation and unemployment dynamics jointly. The commonly documented "stagflation view", namely the households' tendency to associate inflation with a worse labor market, implies amplified impacts of supply shocks and dampened ones of demand shocks.

The U.S. recovery from the Great Recession has been slow relative to other postwar-era recoveries in the United States. Encouraged by loose lending standards in the pre-crisis period, U.S. households took on unsustainable amounts of debt, making them vulnerable to adverse shocks. Subsequently, a considerable drop in asset prices forced households to repair their balance sheets. While there has been progress in household deleveraging, the government sector now needs to delever, which will restrain growth over the next few years.

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.

Data on the use of government securities in the repo, securities lending and cash markets suggest there are bond market clienteles in Canada. Shorter-term bonds are more prevalent in the repo market, while longer-maturity securities are more active in the securities lending market—consistent with the preferred habitat hypothesis. These results could help design better debt-management strategies and more-effective policies to maintain well-functioning financial markets.