When financial system vulnerabilities are elevated, they can give rise to asymmetric risks to the economic outlook. To illustrate this, I consider the economic outlook presented in the Bank of Canada’s October 2017 Monetary Policy Report in the context of two key financial system vulnerabilities: high levels of household indebtedness and housing market imbalances.
The Canadian economy is carrying untapped potential that could prolong the expansion without causing inflation pressures, Governor Stephen S. Poloz said today. In a lecture at Queen’s University, Governor Poloz said that the Canadian economy is currently in the phase of the economic cycle where companies need to expand capacity to meet rising demand. “Growing […]
The official Chinese labour market indicators have been seen as problematic, given their small cyclical movement and their only-partial capture of the labour force. In our paper, we build a monthly Chinese labour market conditions index (LMCI) using text analytics applied to mainland Chinese-language newspapers over the period from 2003 to 2017.
The technology behind blockchain has attracted a lot of attention. However, this technology is for the most part not well understood. There is no consensus on what benefits it may bring or on how it may fail.
This paper estimates an open-economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with Bayesian techniques to analyse the macroeconomic effects of the European Central Bank’s (ECB’s) quantitative easing (QE) programme. Using data on government debt stocks and yields across maturities, we identify the parameter governing portfolio adjustment in the private sector.
We use a new real-time database for Canada to study various output gap measures. This includes recently developed measures based on models incorporating many variables as inputs (and therefore requiring real-time data for many variables).