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Since the May Report, the international economic environment has continued to improve. Economic activity abroad grew faster than expected, while inflation in the major economies remained subdued.

Growth in the Canadian economy has been essentially in line with the expectations set out in the Bank’s January Monetary Policy Report Update.

This is the second in a series of semi-annual reports designed to increase the transparency and understanding of Canadian monetary policy.

The Canadian overnight repo market persistently shows signs of latent funding pressure around month-end periods. Both the overnight repo rate and Bank of Canada liquidity provision tend to rise in these windows. This paper proposes three non-mutually exclusive hypotheses to explain this phenomenon.

The five articles in this issue present research and analysis by Bank staff covering a variety of topics: the growth of Canadian-dollar-denominated assets in official foreign reserves; the emergence of platform-based digital currencies; methods of forecasting the real price of oil; measures of uncertainty in monetary policy; and the recent performance of the labour market in Canada and the United States.

At the time of the November 2000 Monetary Policy Report, although signs of the anticipated slowing of the U.S. economy were becoming apparent, the momentum of the global economy was considered strong.

During the past six months, global economic uncertainties have intensified, largely as a result of developments in emerging-market economies.

In the aftermath of the financial crisis, there is interest in reforming bank regulation such that capital requirements are more closely linked to a bank's contribution to the overall risk of the financial system. In our paper we compare alternative mechanisms for allocating the overall risk of a banking system to its member banks.