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This paper explores the impact of extreme weather exposures on the financial outcomes of low-income households. Our findings highlight the heightened financial vulnerability of low-income households to environmental shocks and underscore the need for targeted policies.

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.

This paper identifies aggregate financial shocks and quantifies their effects on business investment based on an estimated DSGE model with firm-level heterogeneity. On average, financial shocks contribute only 3% of the variation in U.S. public firms’ aggregate investment.

We introduce bounded rationality in a canonical New Keynesian model calibrated to match Canadian macroeconomic data since Canada’s adoption of inflation targeting. We use the model to quantitatively assess the macroeconomic impact of alternative monetary policy regimes.

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.

This issue of the Financial System Review reflects the Bank’s judgment that household indebtedness and housing market imbalances–the most important vulnerabilities for the Canadian financial system–have moved higher over the past six months. However, the financial system remains resilient, and macroeconomic conditions continue to improve. Other vulnerabilities discussed in this FSR are fragile fixed-income market liquidity and the capacity of an interconnected financial system to mitigate cyber threats.

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need for policy-makers to closely monitor disruptions to the retail and food business sectors. We present a new method to measure business opening and closing rates using real-time data from Google Places, the dataset behind the Google Maps service.

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.

Deputy Governor Sylvain Leduc discusses how upgrading Canada’s core payment systems will contribute to financial stability and help the Bank keep inflation on target.