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Although there has been some improvement in conditions over the past several weeks, strains in global credit markets have broadened since December.

FSR Highlights - June 2008

Errata: Some factual errors in the June report "Bank of Canada Oversight Activities during 2007 under the Payment Clearing and Settlement Act" have been corrected. They concern (i) clarification of the U.S. Federal Reserve as lead overseer of CLS Bank and (ii) the steps taken by CDS on 14 August 2007 to assist issuers and participants holding defaulted ABCP.

On 8 and 9 June 2000, the Bank held a seminar to examine some key issues affecting the upcoming decision on Canada's inflation-control target for the period after 2001. The main issues covered at the seminar were the extent of downward nominal-wage rigidity and its implications for employment as well as the relative merits of price-level targeting versus inflation targeting. Another critical question that was discussed was how to balance the evidence on all the relevant issues in order to develop an overall view on the appropriate long-run target. The author gives a brief overview of the seminar followed by detailed summaries of individual papers.

The investment of foreign exchange reserves or other asset portfolios requires an assessment of the credit quality of investment counterparties. Traditionally, foreign exchange reserve and asset managers have relied on credit rating agencies (CRAs) as the main source for credit assessments.

Analyzing TransUnion data from 2015–2024, this study identifies a systematic timeline of distress where rising credit utilization and non-mortgage arrears precede mortgage delinquency by up to two years. This deterioration intensifies in the final six months, providing a robust suite of high-frequency indicators for monitoring emerging household stress.

At the Pittsburgh Summit in 2009, G20 countries announced their commitment to clear all standardized over-the-counter (OTC) derivatives through central counterparties (CCPs). Since then, CCPs have become increasingly important and there has been an extensive program of regulatory enhancements to both them and OTC derivatives markets.

How do changes to personal and corporate income tax rates in the United States affect its trading partners? Spillover effects from cuts in the two taxes differ. They are generally small and negative for corporate taxes, but sizable and positive for personal income taxes.

Today the Bank of Canada launched a digital database with more than 30 years of past staff economic projections of the Canadian economy.

One of the most important arguments in favour of price stability is that unexpected inflation generates changes in the distribution of income and wealth among different economic agents. These redistributions occur because many loans are specified in fixed dollar terms and unexpected inflation redistributes wealth from creditors to debtors by reducing the real value of nominal assets and liabilities.

We develop a model to analyze the link between financial leverage, worker pay structure and the risk of job termination. Contrary to the conventional view, we show that even in the absence of any agency problem among workers, variable pay can be optimal despite workers being risk averse and firms risk neutral.

We study how input-output networks affect the speed of technology adoption. In particular, we model the decision to adopt the programming language Python 3 by software packages. Python 3 provides advanced features but is not backward compatible with Python 2, which implies it comes with adoption costs.