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I provide evidence that portfolio equity inflows can have expansionary effects on GDP and inflation if not offset by monetary policy. I use a shift-share instrument to estimate equity inflows based on plausibly exogenous timing of inflows into mutual funds with heterogeneous country portfolios.

In this issue, Bank researchers discuss the muted recovery from the 2007–09 financial crisis and possible causes. There are also discussions about the Bank’s new Canadian survey of household expectations, measuring both durable goods and housing prices in the CPI and how regulatory changes may affect monetary policy operating frameworks. In the final article, improvements to the management of Canada’s foreign exchange reserves are introduced.

We explore what drives transaction fees in the Bitcoin system and consider whether Bitcoin can remain tamper proof in the long run.

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.

Using data on Canadian bond futures, we examine how high-frequency traders (HFTs) interact with institutions building large positions. In contrast to recent findings, we find HFTs in the data act as small-sized liquidity suppliers, and we reject the hypothesis that they engage in back running, a predatory trading strategy.

We study how participants in the Lynx payment system use the net send limit (NSL) tool to control their intraday payment outflow levels. Our results show that participants typically adopt a “set it and forget it” approach to scheduling NSLs and sometimes have distinct intraday NSL adjustment behaviours.

We study the causal effect of mortgage rate changes on consumer spending, debt repayment and defaults during an expansionary and a contractionary monetary policy episode in Canada. We find asymmetric responses of consumer durable spending, deleveraging and defaults. These findings help us to understand household sector response to interest rate changes.

The emergence of digital currencies such as Bitcoin and the underlying blockchain and distribution ledger technology have attracted significant attention. These developments have raised the possibility of considerable impacts on the financial system and perhaps the wider economy.

In 2016 and 2017, the Bank of Canada added questions to the Business Outlook Survey on firms’ expectations for the magnitude of change in their sales volumes, number of employees, investment spending, input prices and selling prices. This backgrounder describes how the responses are aggregated and examines their relationship with macroeconomic and price measures.

An effective exchange rate is a measure of the value of a country's currency vis-à-vis the currencies of its most important trading partners. The Bank of Canada has created a new Canadian-dollar effective exchange rate index (CERI) to replace the C-6 index that it currently uses. The CERI uses multilateral trade weights published by the International Monetary Fund and includes the six currencies of countries or economic zones with the largest share of Canada's international trade. As such, it better reflects the recent changes in Canada's trade profile, including the rise in the importance of China and Mexico and the relative decline in importance of Europe and Japan in Canada's international trade. The author describes the methodology and construction of the new index and reviews the advantages it offers over the C-6, particularly the use of multilateral trade weights, the inclusion of trade in services, and the use of more recent trade data.