Staff research

As part of modernizing its core payments infrastructure, Canada will replace the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) with a new Real-Time Gross Settlement (RTGS) system called Lynx. An important question for policy-makers is how Lynx should be designed.

Improving the conduct of monetary policy is unlikely to be the main motivation for central banks to issue a central bank digital currency (CBDC). While some argue that a CBDC could allow more complex transfer schemes or the ability to break below the zero lower bound, we find these benefits might be small or difficult to realize in practice.

Should a central bank take over the provision of e-money, a circulable electronic liability? We discuss how e-money technology changes the tradeoff between public and private provision, and the tradeoff between e-money and a central bank's existing liabilities like bank notes and reserves.

This paper presents four blue-sky ideas for lowering the cost of the Government of Canada’s debt without increasing the debt’s risk profile. We argue that each idea would improve the secondary-market liquidity of government debt, thereby increasing the demand for government bonds and thus lowering their cost at issuance.

We present a policy framework for electronic money and payments. The framework poses a set of positive questions related to the areas of responsibility of central banks: payments systems, monetary policy and financial stability. The questions are posed to four broad forms of e-money: privately or publicly issued, and with centralized or decentralized verification of transactions. This framework is intended to help evaluate the trade-offs that central banks face in the decision to issue new forms of e-money.

We present the daily time series of the outstanding amounts of all Government of Canada marketable debt securities from July 2001 to June 2017.

We investigate the risks and opportunities to the mandates of central banks arising from fintech developments.