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Financial frictions affect how much consumers spend on durable and non-durable goods. Borrowers can face both loan-to-value (LTV) constraints and payment-to-income (PTI) constraints.

This paper examines the experience of Sweden with government notes and private bank notes to determine how well the Swedish experience corresponds to that of Canada and the United States. Sweden is important to study because it has had government notes in circulation for more than 350 years, and it had government notes before private bank notes.

Using a rich data set on government spending forecasts in Japan, we provide new evidence on the effects of unexpected changes in government spending when the nominal interest rate is near the zero lower bound (ZLB).

This paper studies how the allocation of residual losses affects trading and welfare in a central counterparty. I compare loss sharing under two loss-allocation mechanisms – variation margin haircutting and cash calls – and study the privately and socially optimal degree of loss sharing.

It is widely understood that the real price of globally traded commodities is determined by the forces of demand and supply. One of the main determinants of the real price of commodities is shifts in the demand for commodities associated with unexpected fluctuations in global real economic activity.

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney discusses the future of monetary policy.

We study the transmission and third-country effects of international sanctions. A sanctioned country’s losses are mitigated, and the sanctioning country’s losses amplified, if a third country does not join the sanctions, but the third country benefits from not joining.

We present a simple model to study the risk sensitivity of capital regulation. A banker funds investment with uninsured deposits and costly capital, where capital resolves a moral hazard problem in the banker’s choice of risk.

This article examines the developments in the monetary aggregates over the course of 1997 and their implications for future economic activity. The narrow aggregate, M1, grew rapidly in the first half of 1997 but slowed somewhat during the second half of the year. Much of the strong growth in this aggregate over the last several years has been associated with a higher demand for transactions balances as interest rates declined and economic activity revived. There were some special factors at play, however, that are discussed in the article. The Bank expects some slowing in M1 growth through 1998 and into 1999. This would be consistent with a trend of inflation within the inflation-control target range of 1 to 3 per cent over the next couple of years. Growth in the broad aggregate, M2+, continued to be distorted by the shift of savings out of fixed-term deposits into mutual funds. A broader aggregate that includes M2+, CSBs, and all mutual funds and thus provides a better estimate of broad money growth, grew at a moderate pace during 1997. The recent behaviour of the broad monetary aggregates continues to suggest that inflation will remain low in coming years.

This article examines four indicators of balance-sheet risks—leverage, capital, asset liquidity and funding—among different types of financial institutions in Canada over the past three decades. It also discusses relevant developments in the banking sector that could have contributed to the observed dynamics. The authors find that the various risk indicators decreased during the period for most of the non-Big Six financial institutions, but remained relatively unchanged for the Big Six banks. In addition, the balance-sheet risk indicators became more heterogeneous across financial institutions. The observed overall decline and increased heterogeneity follow certain regulatory changes, such as the introduction of the liquidity guidelines on funding in 1995 and the implementation of bank-specific leverage requirements in 2000. Given that these regulations required more balance-sheet risk management, they have likely contributed to the increased resilience of the banking sector.