Search

An international initiative to increase the use of central clearing for OTC derivatives emerged as one of the reactions to the 2008 financial crisis. The move to central clearing is a fundamental change in the structure of the market.

Stock market fundamentals would not seem to meaningfully predict returns over a shorter-term horizon—instead, I shift focus to severe downside risk (i.e., crashes).

Following the financial crisis, there has been increased regulatory focus on the management of liquidity in mutual funds and, specifically, whether funds hold enough liquidity to guard against the potential for investor runs.

When lenders cannot directly identify behavioural and rational borrowers, they use type scoring to track the likelihood of a borrower’s type. This leads to the partial pooling of borrowers, which results in rational borrowers subsidizing borrowing costs for behavioural borrowers. This, in turn, reduces the effectiveness of regulatory policies that target mistakes by behavioural borrowers.

Senior Deputy Governor Carolyn A. Wilkins discusses developments in the Canadian labour market and factors that may help explain why wage growth is slower than expected.

Understanding how much of the increased debt load of Canadian households has been used to finance household spending on consumption and home renovation is important for the conduct of monetary policy. In this article, the authors use a comprehensive data set that provides information on the uses of debt by Canadian households. They first present some facts regarding the evolution of Canadian household debt over the period from 1999 to 2010, emphasizing the increased importance of debt flows that are secured by housing. They then explore how Canadian households have used their borrowed funds over the same period, and assess the role of these borrowed funds in financing total consumption and spending on home renovation. Finally, they examine the possible effects of a decline in house prices on consumption when housing equity is used as collateral against household indebtedness.

Until recently, few efforts have been made to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada (BoC) developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults that is posted on its website and updated in partnership with the Bank of England (BoE).

This paper uses real-time briefing forecasts prepared for the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) to provide estimates of historical changes in the design of U.S. monetary policy and in the implied central-bank target for inflation. Empirical results support a description of policy with an effective inflation target of roughly 7 percent in the 1970s.

We present a model of central bank collateralized lending to study the optimal choice of the haircut policy. We show that a lending facility provides a bundle of two types of insurance: insurance against liquidity risk as well as insurance against downside risk of the collateral.