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This note presents a composite indicator of Canadian financial system vulnerabilities—the Vulnerabilities Barometer. It aims to complement the Bank of Canada’s vulnerabilities assessment by adding a quantitative and synthesized perspective to the more granular (distributional) analysis presented in the Financial System Review.

The authors trace the development of the Basel III standards for banking regulation. Basel III builds on two earlier frameworks, in response to weaknesses revealed during the global financial crisis. They highlight how implementation of the standards will underpin greater financial stability and provide a sound foundation for economic growth.

This report examines detailed data on home mortgages to provide a better understanding of the vulnerabilities associated with the mortgage market. The proportion of low-ratio mortgages is growing, particularly in regions with strong house price growth. Moreover, these borrowers exhibit less flexibility to adverse shocks, since they have high debt levels relative to income and have taken mortgages with long amortization periods.

Proportional reduction is a common cartel practice in which cartel members reduce their output proportionately. We develop a method to quantify this reduction relative to a benchmark market equilibrium scenario and relate the reduction to the traditional conduct parameter.

The transmission of oil price shocks has been a question of central interest in macroeconomics since the 1970s. There has been renewed interest in this question after the large and persistent fall in the real price of oil in 2014–16. In the context of this debate, Ramey (2017) makes the striking claim that the existing literature on the transmission of oil price shocks is fundamentally confused about the question of how to quantify the effect of oil price shocks.

This paper shows that changes in market participants’ fear of rare events implied by crude oil options contribute to oil price volatility and oil return predictability. Using 25 years of historical data, we document economically large tail risk premia that vary substantially over time and significantly forecast crude oil futures and spot returns.

Oil prices have declined sharply over the past three years. While both supply and demand factors played a role in the large oil price decline of 2014, global supply growth seems to have been the predominant force. The most important drivers were likely the surprising growth of US shale oil production, the output decisions of the Organization of the Petro-leum Exporting Countries and the weaker-than-expected global growth that followed the 2009 global financial crisis.

The neutral rate serves as a benchmark for measuring monetary stimulus and provides a medium- to long-run anchor for the real policy rate. Global neutral rate estimates have been falling over the past few decades. Factors such as population aging, high corporate savings, and low trend productivity growth are likely to continue supporting a low global neutral rate. These global factors as well as domestic factors are exerting downward pres-sure on the Canadian real neutral rate, which is estimated to be between 0.5 to 1.5 per cent. This low neutral rate has important implications for monetary policy and financial stability.

For central banks, conducting policy in an environment of uncertainty is a daily fact of life. This uncertainty can take many forms, ranging from incomplete knowledge of the correct economic model and data to future economic and geopolitical events whose precise magnitudes and effects cannot be known with certainty.

In this paper, we analyze the presence of time variation in the pass-through from the nominal effective exchange rate to import prices for 24 advanced economies over the period 1995–2015. In line with earlier studies in the literature, we find substantial heterogeneity in the level of exchange rate pass-through across countries.