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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.

In the last half-year, the economic expansion in Canada has become well established, supported by low inflation, highly stimulative monetary conditions, and a strong U.S. economy.

Growth in the global economy began to slow in the fourth quarter of 2007 and the first quarter of 2008. This reflected the effects of the slowdown in the U.S. economy and ongoing dislocations in global financial markets.

The global economy has continued to grow at a robust pace since the July Monetary Policy Report Update.

The Canadian economy continues to adjust to major global developments.

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

The Canadian economy continues to grow at a solid pace, consistent with the Bank’s outlook in the January Monetary Policy Report Update.

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.

In the year just ended, the global economy faced a number of exceptional challenges, reflecting a wide range of economic, financial, and geopolitical risks and uncertainties. These included the fallout from the September 2001 terrorist attacks, corporate accounting scandals, stock market volatility, and developments in the Middle East. Despite this global backdrop, the Canadian economy outperformed virtually all other industrial economies, growing by about 3 1/4 per cent and creating 560,000 jobs, while inflation expectations remained well anchored to the Bank of Canada’s 2 per cent inflation-control target.

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.