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Our layered machine learning framework can enhance real-time transaction monitoring in high-value payment systems, which are a central piece of a country’s financial infrastructure. When tested on data from Canadian payment systems, it demonstrated potential for accurately identifying anomalous transactions. This framework could help improve cyber and operational resilience of payment systems.

This paper studies short-term forecasting of Canadian real GDP and its expenditure components using combinations of nowcasts from different models. Starting with a medium-sized data set, we use a suite of common nowcasting tools for quarterly real GDP and its expenditure components.

Bank of Canada Deputy Governor Sharon Kozicki discusses how differences among households affect economic outcomes, how shocks can have important uneven effects across households, and why these things matter for monetary policy.

Staff projections provided for the Bank of Canada's monetary policy decision process take into account the integration of Canada's very open economy within the global economy, as well as its close real and financial linkages with the United States. To provide inputs for this projection, the Bank has developed several models, including MUSE, NEUQ (the New European Quarterly Model), and BoC-GEM (Bank of Canada Global Economy Model), to analyze and forecast economic developments in the rest of the world. The authors focus on MUSE, the model currently used to describe interaction among the principal U.S. economic variables, including gross domestic product, inflation, interest rates, and the exchange rate. Brief descriptions are also provided of NEUQ and BoC-GEM.

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.

Hurricanes disrupt oil production in the Gulf of Mexico because producers shut in oil platforms to safeguard lives and prevent damage. We examine the effects of these temporary oil supply shocks on real economic activity in the United States.

Cash is the preferred method of payment for small value transactions generally less than $25. We provide insight to this finding with a new theoretical model that characterizes and compares consumers’ costs of paying with cash to paying with cards for each transaction.

This paper provides a non-technical introduction to monetary policy - what it is, how it works, and why it matters. It discusses inflation volatility and why this is damaging to the economy, as well as why increased stability of output growth is desirable.

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?

Using turnover ratios, Anderson and Lavoie describe the recent evolution of liquidity in various secondary government bond markets, focusing specifically on the market for Government of Canada securities. They attribute much of the recent variation in liquidity to such cyclical factors as changes in the interest rate environment and investors' appetite for risk, as well as developments in equity markets in the late 1990s. They also examine longer-term structural and policy-related trends, including the rate of adoption of financial and technological innovations and the level of government borrowing and debt-management initiatives.