Financial markets
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June 7, 2018
The Bank of Canada’s Financial System Survey
This report presents the details of a new semi-annual survey that will improve the Bank of Canada’s surveillance across the financial system and deepen efforts to engage with financial system participants. The survey collects expert opinions on the risks to and resilience of the Canadian financial system as well as on emerging trends and financial innovations. The report presents an overview of the survey and provides high-level results from the spring 2018 survey. -
June 7, 2018
Establishing a Resolution Regime for Canada’s Financial Market Infrastructures
This report highlights how an effective resolution regime promotes financial stability. It does this by ensuring that financial market infrastructures (FMIs) would be able to continue to provide their critical functions during a period of stress when an FMI’s own recovery measures were failing. The report explains the Bank of Canada’s new role as the resolution authority for FMIs, which will further bolster financial system resilience. -
Noisy Monetary Policy
We introduce limited information in monetary policy. Agents receive signals from the central bank revealing new information (“news") about the future evolution of the policy rate before changes in the rate actually take place. However, the signal is disturbed by noise. -
How do Canadian Corporate Bond Mutual Funds Meet Investor Redemptions?
When investors redeem their fund shares for cash, fixed-income fund managers can choose whether to draw on their liquid holdings or sell bonds in the secondary market. We analyze the liquidity-management decisions of Canadian corporate bond mutual funds, focusing on the strategies they use to meet investor redemptions. -
Customer Liquidity Provision in Canadian Bond Markets
This analytical note assesses the prevalence of liquidity provision by institutional investors in Canadian bonds. We find that the practice is not prevalent in Canada. Customer liquidity provision is more prevalent for less liquid bonds, on days when liquidity is already expensive or when there are larger trading volumes. In our interpretation, Canadian dealers draw on customer liquidity as a supplementary source of liquidity and only when necessary, given its cost. -
Order Flow Segmentation, Liquidity and Price Discovery: The Role of Latency Delays
Latency delays—known as “speed bumps”—are an intentional slowing of order flow by exchanges. Supporters contend that delays protect market makers from high-frequency arbitrage, while opponents warn that delays promote “quote fading” by market makers. We construct a model of informed trading in a fragmented market, where one market operates a conventional order book and the other imposes a latency delay on market orders. -
Did Canadian Corporate Bond Funds Increase their Exposures to Risks?
Canadian corporate bond mutual funds have rapidly increased in number and size in recent years. Their holdings have also become riskier, increasing their exposures to credit risk, interest rate risk and liquidity risk. We also briefly discuss financial stability implications. -
Is the Excess Bond Premium a Leading Indicator of Canadian Economic Activity?
This note investigates whether Canadian corporate spreads and the excess bond premium (EBP) lead Canadian economic activity. Indeed, we find that corporate spreads precede changes in real gross domestic product (GDP) in Canada over the subsequent year. The EBP accounts for most of this property. Further, an unanticipated increase in the Canadian EBP forecasts a deterioration of domestic macroeconomic conditions: a 10-basis-point increase results in a fall in both GDP and consumer price index (CPI) of 0.4 per cent and 0.1 per cent, respectively, over three years. -
High-Frequency Trading and Institutional Trading Costs
Using data on Canadian bond futures, we examine how high-frequency traders (HFTs) interact with institutions building large positions. In contrast to recent findings, we find HFTs in the data act as small-sized liquidity suppliers, and we reject the hypothesis that they engage in back running, a predatory trading strategy.