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In this issue of the Financial System Review, the Governing Council judges that the risks to the stability of Canada’s financial system remain high, as in December. The sources of the key risks are broadly the same as those highlighted at that time and emanate primarily from the external environment.

Errata: The colour labels for Chart 11 in the June 2012 issue and for Chart 12 in the December 2011 isssue were defined incorrectly. See revised charts.

How should a central bank conduct quantitative easing (QE) in a monetary union when regions differ in their size and portfolio characteristics? Optimal QE policy suggests allocating greater purchases from the region that faces stronger portfolio frictions, and not necessarily according to each region’s size.

Long-term Canada-U.S. interest spreads have changed remarkably during the 1990s. The unusually wide spreads of the first half of the decade have given way to an unprecedented run of negative yield differentials. In this article, the author examines the conceptual aspects of yields on international assets and their application to the Canada-U.S. situation. Prior to 1995, investors were unsure that, over the long run, inflation would meet the targets set by the government and the Bank. Policy credibility was undermined by large budget deficits and political uncertainty. In the second half of the decade, confidence was re-established as the fiscal positions of governments improved, long-run price stability became established, and political concerns about Quebec lessened. As long as these fundamentals hold, long-term rates should remain relatively low, even when short-term rates rise.

The Financial System Review concludes that the overall level of risk to Canada’s financial system is largely unchanged from six months ago. While household vulnerabilities have moved higher, the ongoing economic recovery in Canada means that the overall risk remains the same. The Bank highlights three vulnerabilities in the financial system: the elevated level of household indebtedness, imbalances in some regional housing markets and the fragility of liquidity in fixed-income markets.

This article examines the developments in the monetary aggregates over the course of 1997 and their implications for future economic activity. The narrow aggregate, M1, grew rapidly in the first half of 1997 but slowed somewhat during the second half of the year. Much of the strong growth in this aggregate over the last several years has been associated with a higher demand for transactions balances as interest rates declined and economic activity revived. There were some special factors at play, however, that are discussed in the article. The Bank expects some slowing in M1 growth through 1998 and into 1999. This would be consistent with a trend of inflation within the inflation-control target range of 1 to 3 per cent over the next couple of years. Growth in the broad aggregate, M2+, continued to be distorted by the shift of savings out of fixed-term deposits into mutual funds. A broader aggregate that includes M2+, CSBs, and all mutual funds and thus provides a better estimate of broad money growth, grew at a moderate pace during 1997. The recent behaviour of the broad monetary aggregates continues to suggest that inflation will remain low in coming years.

Examination of progress in the Bank’s exploration of two alternatives to the current inflation-targeting framework: (i) lowering the inflation target and (ii) shifting to a price-level target; a review of arguments for and against price-level targeting, focusing on its costs and benefits compared with inflation targeting; assessing the merits of price-level targeting vis-à-vis inflation targeting from a debt-revaluation perspective; quantifying redistribution of wealth in Canada in the face of unexpected inflation.

We present a dynamic debt strategy model framework designed to assist sovereign debt portfolio managers in choosing an optimal debt issuance strategy. The main innovation of this framework is the introduction of dynamic issuance strategies, which allow issuance decisions to vary over time based on the model’s simulated state variables.

The industry standard for seasonally adjusting data, X-13ARIMA-SEATS, is not suitable for high-frequency data. We summarize and assess several of the most popular seasonal adjustment methods for weekly data given the increased availability and promise of non-traditional data at higher frequencies.

This report reviews the use of quantitative tools to gauge market participants’ assessment of banking system resilience. These measures complement traditional balance-sheet metrics and suggest that markets consider large Canadian banks to be better placed to weather adverse shocks than banks in other advanced economies. Compared with regulatory capital ratios, however, the measures suggest less improvement in banking system resilience since the pre-crisis period.

In 2023, the share of Canadian banks’ foreign assets and liabilities amounted to around 50%. While Canadian banks engage domestically mostly with households and non-financial corporations, their most common counterparties abroad are non-bank financial institutions.