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Severe disruptions in the financial markets, as observed during the 2008 global financial crisis or the COVID-19 pandemic, can impair the stability of the entire financial system and worsen macroeconomic downturns.

Since the May Report, the international economic environment has continued to improve. Economic activity abroad grew faster than expected, while inflation in the major economies remained subdued.

Recent years have seen renewed interest in the regulation of interbank markets. A review of the literature in this area identifies two gaps: first, the literature has tended to make ad hoc assumptions about the interbank contract space, which makes it difficult to generate convincing policy prescriptions; second, the literature has tended to focus on ex-post interventions that kick in only after an interbank disruption has come underway (e.g., open-market operations, lender-of-last-resort interventions, bail-outs), rather than ex-ante prudential policies.

Bank of Canada staff are running a “horse race” of alternative monetary policy frameworks in the lead-up to 2021 renewal of the Bank’s monetary policy framework. This paper summarizes some interim results of model simulations from their research.

The consumption boom-bust cycle in the 2000s coincided with large fluctuations in the volume of home equity borrowing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I show that homeowners largely borrowed for residential investment and not consumption.

This paper examines the cross-border spillovers from major economies’ quantitative easing (QE) policies to their trading partners. We concentrate on spillovers from the US to Canada during the zero lower bound period when QE policies were actively used.

In an economy where production takes place in multiple stages and is subject to financial frictions, how firms finance intermediate inputs matters for aggregate outcomes. This paper focuses on trade credit—the lending and borrowing of input goods between firms—and quantifies its aggregate impacts during the Great Recession.

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 decompose total variance into its bad and good components and measure the premia associated with their fluctuations using stock and option data from a large cross-section of firms.

The disruption due to COVID-19 reverberated through the bond markets in three phases. In the first phase, dealers met the rising demand for liquidity. In the second, dealers reduced the supply of liquidity, and trading conditions worsened significantly. Finally, the market returned to relative stability following several interventions by the Bank of Canada.