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Freedman and Engert focus on the changing pattern of lending and borrowing in Canada in the past thirty to forty years, including the types of financial instruments used and the relative roles of financial institutions and financial markets. They examine how borrowing mechanisms have changed over time and consider the challenges facing the Canadian financial sector, including whether our financial markets are in danger of disappearing because of the size and pre-eminence of U.S. financial markets. Some of the trends examined here include syndicated lending, securitization, and credit derivatives, a form of financial engineering that has become increasingly important in the last few years. They also study bond and equity markets to determine whether Canadian capital markets have been hollowed out or abandoned by Canadian firms and conclude that the data do not provide much support for that view.

Businesses remain positive about the economic outlook, although some forward-looking indicators have eased from the levels recorded in recent surveys, and the strength in commodity prices has raised expectations for costs and inflation.

Erratum: Please note that the legend for Chart 9 (French version only) should read as follows: au-dessus de 3 % , rather than au-dessous de 3 %

Carbon dioxide emissions have been commonly modelled as rising and falling with total output. Yet many factors, such as energy-efficiency improvements and shifts to cleaner energy, can break this relationship. We evaluate these factors using US data and find that changes in energy efficiency of consumption goods explain a significant proportion of emissions fluctuations. This finding also implies that models that omit energy efficiency likely overestimate the trade-off between environmental protection and economic performance.

Deputy Governor Timothy Lane talks about how the Bank of Canada is contributing to the modernization of our payments ecosystem, and how the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to make payments more convenient for all Canadians.

The turmoil in global financial markets entered a new phase in September, moving to a more acute and broad-based loss of confidence in the context of a series of failures and near-failures of large financial institutions in the United States and Europe.

FSR Highlights - December 2008

Quarterly Financial Report - First Quarter 2018 - For the period ended March 31, 2018

The authors review the eight largest public pension funds in Canada. These funds are an important source of retirement income for Canadians. They are also significant investors, with net assets under management of over $1 trillion. The authors outline the investment strategies of the funds and how they interact with financial institutions and participate in financial markets. They also discuss the ways in which the funds’ risk-management frameworks could contribute to financial system stability and how they minimize potential vulnerabilities.

Stock market fundamentals would not seem to meaningfully predict returns over a shorter-term horizon—instead, I shift focus to severe downside risk (i.e., crashes).

This paper examines how climate change affects income inequality across US states. Using a new climate-inequality VAR and a century of daily temperature data, it shows that shifts across the full temperature distribution—not just average warming—have diverse effects on within-state inequality.

This paper studies the effects of foreign exchange (FX) interventions in a two-region model where governments issue both short- and long-term bonds. We find that the term premium channel dominates the trade balance channel in our calibrated model. As a result, the conventional beggar-thy-neighbor effects of interventions are overturned.