Search

On Wednesday, January 29, 2025, the Bank of Canada will announce its decision on the target for the overnight rate. A press release will provide a brief explanation of the decision. The Bank will also publish its quarterly Monetary Policy Report (MPR) at the same time as the rate decision.

The Canadian dollar has declined against the US dollar since October 2024, mostly due to rising uncertainty around trade policies. A widening differential in policy interest rates between the two countries has also played a modest role.

Economic growth has ticked up in Canada, boosted by past cuts in interest rates. In the absence of new tariffs, growth is forecast to strengthen, and inflation remains close to 2%. But the threat of new tariffs is causing major uncertainty.

The new US administration is considering sweeping tariffs on imports. While many important elements are unknown, these measures could be highly disruptive to the Canadian and US economies.

The prospect of wide-ranging US import tariffs is the most important risk to the outlook. Given the fast-evolving situation and the high degree of uncertainty, the Bank has chosen not to include new tariffs in the projection.

Results from the Business Outlook Survey and the Business Leaders’ Pulse show that overall business conditions remain subdued, but firms are beginning to anticipate improvements in activity. Sales outlooks continue to show signs of improvement after a period of weakness. Yet many businesses still have spare capacity, which is reducing their need to expand. Firms expect cost growth, including wages, to soften further. Expectations for inflation moved slightly higher but remain within the Bank of Canada’s target range.

Results from the CSCE show that consumer sentiment improved this quarter, mainly due to recent interest rate cuts and the expectation of further cuts ahead. Consumers reported stronger spending plans. Still, they reported that high prices of many goods and services, economic uncertainty and elevated housing costs continue to weigh on spending decisions. Consumer confidence in the labour market has weakened and is now slightly below the survey average. Consumers’ inflation expectations have largely returned to historical norms.

On Monday, January 20, 2025, the Bank of Canada will release the fourth quarter issues of the Business Outlook Survey and the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations.

This paper provides an extensive evaluation of the performance of quantile vector autoregression (QVAR) to forecast macroeconomic risk. Generally, QVAR outperforms standard benchmark models. Moreover, QVAR and QVAR augmented with factors perform equally well. Both are adequate for modeling macroeconomic risks.