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The Canadian economy continues to adjust to developments in the global economy.

At the Bank of Canada, we have worked hard over the past several years to define our goals and our methods for achieving them. We have continued to strengthen our monetary policy framework, and we have established priorities in all areas of our operations to help us meet our strategic objectives. In 2002, the Bank set out a medium-term plan for the period 2003–05. The plan’s clearly defined policy frameworks and priorities were critical in guiding our analysis and our decisions in 2003, a year in which Canadians across the country were affected by a number of severe and unanticipated events.

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 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.

Since the last Report, the Canadian economy has advanced broadly in line with expectations.

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.

We introduce behavioral learning equilibria (BLE) into DSGE models with boundedly rational agents using simple but optimal first order autoregressive forecasting rules. The Smets-Wouters DSGE model with BLE is estimated and fits well with inflation survey expectations. As a policy application, we show that learning requires a lower degree of interest rate smoothing.

Six months ago, at the time of the last Monetary Policy Report, the global economic and financial environment was volatile and highly uncertain because of the adverse situation in Asia and the fallout from the Russian debt moratorium.

The year that just passed posed many challenges for all Canadians. The slowdown in the global economy became more pronounced as the year went on, and this affected households, businesses, and governments alike. The tragedy of 11 September compounded the economic difficulties and issues facing us all. Through this period of rapidly changing circumstances, the Bank met its responsibilities by responding quickly and vigorously to events in order to underpin confidence and support the economy.