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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.

We propose a range of benchmarks for assessing labour market strength for monetary policy. This work builds on a previous framework that considers how diverse and segmented the labour market is. We apply these benchmarks to the Canadian labour market and find that it has more than recovered from the COVID-19 shock.

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.

How can Surveys of Professional Forecasters (SPF) be used to improve inflation forecasts? By using US historical quarterly data on SPF forecasts, we provide better understanding of how we can use forecast disagreement to improve our own forecasts.

Developments are underway to replace Canada’s two core payment systems with three new systems. We use a discrete choice model to predict migration patterns of end-users and financial institutions for future systems and discuss their policy implications.

Éric Chouinard and Graydon Paulin review the progress to date in implementing Basel III, the new framework of global regulatory standards for the banking sector developed by the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision. The report highlights the expected net benefits of implementing Basel III, as well as the challenges in ensuring international consistency in measuring the risk-weighted capital of banks. It includes a discussion on how implementing Basel III has affected the banking system in Canada and other important jurisdictions, and demonstrates the need for ongoing assessment of the effects on the financial system and the macroeconomy.

We provide an updated evaluation of the value of various measures of core inflation that could be used in the conduct of monetary policy. We find that the Bank of Canada’s current preferred measures of core inflation—CPI-trim, CPI-median and CPI-common—continue to outperform alternative core measures across a range of criteria.

During downturns, workers get stuck in low-productivity jobs and wages remain stagnant. I build an heterogenous agent incomplete market model with a full job ladder that accounts for these facts. An adverse financial shock calibrated to the US Great Recession replicates the period’s slow recovery and missing disinflation.

This paper studies the cost of limited commitment when a central bank has the discretion to adjust policy whenever the costs of honoring its past commitments become high. Specifically, we consider a central bank that seeks to implement optimal policy in a New Keynesian model by committing to a price-level target path.