Search

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

This Report presents the Bank of Canada’s assessment of the trend of inflation in Canada and explains the monetary policy actions deemed necessary to keep inflation within the Bank’s inflation-control target range.

Household debt can be an important source of vulnerability to the financial system. This technical report describes the Household Risk Assessment Model (HRAM) that has been developed at the Bank of Canada to stress test household balance sheets at the individual level.

Two major issues dominate the analysis and policy discussion in this Monetary Policy Report: the nature and extent of the global economic slowdown that began late last year and the consequences of the terrorist attacks in the United States.

Over the past year, Canada’s economy has outperformed the economies of virtually all the other major industrial countries.

The Canadian economy regained strong momentum in 1999 as the U.S. economy remained vigorous, the global economy recovered, and commodity prices moved upwards.

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.

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.

Using the quantum Monte Carlo algorithm, we study whether quantum computing can improve the run time of economic applications and challenges in doing so. We apply the algorithm to two models: a stress testing bank model and a DSGE model solved with deep learning. We also present innovations in the algorithm and benchmark it to classical Monte Carlo.

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