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Ron Morrow, Executive Director of Payments, Supervision and Oversight, talks about innovations in the payments ecosystem. He also highlights the Bank’s new role as supervisor of payment service providers.

It's been a difficult year for many sectors of the Alberta economy. Certainly, the severe drought hurt many western farmers, and investment in the energy sector was held back by low oil and gas prices. In addition, the slump in the telecom sector has affected Calgary.

We investigate the uncertainty around stock returns at different investment horizons. Since a return is either a loss or a gain, we categorize return uncertainty into two components—loss uncertainty and gain uncertainty. We then use these components to evaluate investment.

As a guide for the conduct of monetary policy, most central banks make use of a trend inflation index similar to that employed by the Bank of Canada: the CPI excluding food, energy, and the effect of indirect taxes. In addition to their basic reference index, some central banks regularly publish statistical measures of the trend rate of inflation. The method used for producing these measures is, for the most part, based on the hypothesis that extreme price fluctuations generally reflect temporary shocks to the inflation rate, rather than its underlying trend. In this paper, the author offers a broad survey of studies on the measurement of trend inflation that have been published by the Bank of Canada and presents the results of the most recent work on the subject. Particular attention is paid to two statistical measures that the Bank follows more closely than other measures; namely, the CPIX, a price index that excludes eight of the most volatile CPI components, and CPIW, a measure that retains all the components of the overall index but gives a lower weighting to the most volatile.

This paper reviews the range of extraordinary programs launched by the Bank of Canada in response to the pandemic-related financial market disruption. It provides some recommendations for future interventions to ensure the programs are appropriately structured for the financial and economic stresses they are intended to address.

This study uses the COVID-19 travel restrictions to estimate foreign demand for Canadian banknotes. It reveals that international visitors accounted for about 10% of all $100 CAD notes in circulation pre-pandemic, with each visitor carrying an average of $165 in hundred-dollar bills.

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.

Risk-management systems in financial institutions have come under increasing scrutiny in light of the current financial crisis, resulting in calls for improvements and an increased role for regulators. Yet such objectives miss the intricacy at the heart of the risk-management process. This article outlines the complexity inherent in any modern risk-management system, which arises because there are shortcuts in the theoretical models that risk managers need to be aware of, as well as the difficulties in sensible calibration of model parameters. The author suggests that prudential regulation of such systems should focus on failures within the financial firm and in the market interactions between firms and reviews possible strategies that can improve the performance of risk management and microprudential regulatory practice.

This section of the Financial System Review examines the recent performance of the Canadian financial system and the factors, both domestic and international, that are influencing it. In each issue, one or more subjects of particular interest are discussed as highlighted topics.