Monetary and financial indicators
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How to Improve Inflation Targeting at the Bank of Canada
This paper shows that if the Bank of Canada is optimally adjusting its monetary policy instrument in response to inflation indicators to target 2 per cent inflation at a two-year horizon, then deviations of inflation from 2 per cent represent the Bank's forecast errors, and should be uncorrelated with its information set, which includes two-year lagged values of the instrument and the indicators. Positive or negative correlations are evidence of systematic errors in monetary policy. -
August 20, 2002
Information and Analysis for Monetary Policy: Coming to a Decision
This article outlines one of the Bank's key approaches to dealing with the uncertainty that surrounds decisions on monetary policy: the consideration of a wide range of information from a variety of sources. More specifically, it describes the information and analysis that the monetary policy decision-makers—the Governing Council of the Bank of Canada—receive in the two or three weeks leading up to a decision on the setting of the policy rate—the target overnight interest rate. The article also describes how the Governing Council reaches this decision. -
Corporate Bond Spreads and the Business Cycle
This paper examines the predictive power of credit spreads from the corporate bond market. The high-yield bond spread and investment-grade spread can explain 68 per cent and 42 per cent of output variations one year ahead, while the term spread based on government debts can explain only 12 per cent of them. -
Forecasting GDP Growth Using Artificial Neural Networks
Financial and monetary variables have long been known to contain useful leading information regarding economic activity. In this paper, the authors wish to determine whether the forecasting performance of such variables can be improved using neural network models. The main findings are that, at the 1-quarter forecasting horizon, neural networks yield no significant forecast improvements. […] -
May 11, 1998
The use of forward rate agreements in Canada
In this article, the authors identify forward rate agreements, or FRAs, as short-term interest rate guarantee instruments negotiated by two parties, one of which is typically a bank. In outlining the main features of FRAs, the authors contrast them with BAX contracts (futures contracts on bankers' acceptances that are negotiated through the Montreal Exchange). The article then describes how market participants use FRAs to cover short-term interest rate risk. The final section deals with the way the Bank of Canada uses information from the FRA market as an indicator of interest rate expectations. Econometric models used to retrieve information from FRA rates, as well as the underlying assumptions, are discussed in an appendix. -
The Structure of Interest Rates in Canada: Information Content about Medium-Term Inflation
This paper examines the relationship between the term structure of interest rates and future changes in inflation for Canada using a newly constructed par-value yield series. The main conclusion of the empirical work is that the slope of the nominal term structure from 1- to 5-year maturities is a reasonably good predictor of future changes in inflation over these horizons. -
Interpreting Money-Supply and Interest-Rate Shocks as Monetary-Policy Shocks
In this paper two shocks are analysed using Canadian data: a money-supply shock ("M-shock") and an interest-rate shock ("R-shock"). Money-supply shocks are derived using long-run restrictions based on long-run propositions of monetary theory. Thus, an M-shock is represented by an orthogonalized innovation in the trend shared by money and prices. -
Overnight Rate Innovations as a Measure of Monetary Policy Shocks in Vector Autoregressions
The authors examine the Bank of Canada's overnight rate as a measure of monetary policy in vector autoregression (VAR) models. Since the time series of the Bank's current measure of the overnight rate begins only in 1971, the authors splice it to day loan rate observations to obtain a sufficiently long period of data. -
The Empirical Performance of Alternative Monetary and Liquidity Aggregates
This paper examines the empirical performance of alternatives to the monetary aggregates currently published by the Bank of Canada. The results show that real M1 and real M1a perform about equally well in providing leading information about real output at short horizons. However, on theoretical grounds, M1a is a more attractive aggregate, since it excludes […]