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Over the last 30 years, the business mix of banks in Canada has changed significantly. Progress in information-processing technology, legislative changes, and market forces have combined to blur the traditional distinctions between banks and other financial institutions and have allowed banks to offer a much wider range of products and services. In this article, the author reviews the expansion of bank lending to households over this period and their recent movement into personal wealth management. While these trends were facilitated by revisions to legislation, they also reflected the changing needs of the "baby boom" generation, first as home-buyers and, more recently, as middle-aged investors. On the commercial and corporate side, banks reacted to the rapid expansion of securities markets (and to the reduced demand for intermediation by both lenders/depositors and borrowers) by moving into investment banking, after legislative changes opened this business to them in the late 1980s. They also used their expertise in credit assessment and risk management to provide credit guarantees and to act as counterparties and intermediaries in derivatives markets. Notable in this broadening of bank activities has been their more recent entry into the trust, mutual fund, and retail brokerage business. The banks have also made preliminary forays into insurance. The expansion of off-balance-sheet activities has made fee income an increasingly important part of bank earnings. The article also looks at the emerging tools and techniques that will most likely transform the structure of banking in the future.

We assess the Canadian nominal neutral rate to be in the range of 2.25% to 3.25%, unchanged from our assessment in 2025. We assess the US nominal neutral rate to be in the range of 2.50% to 3.50%, somewhat higher than the range of 2.25% to 3.25% reported in the 2025 assessment.

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).

The Bank of Canada continues to evolve its operations in response to rapid changes in the data landscape. The Bank is making more effective use of available data from a broad, diverse and growing set of sources; reducing potential risks related to data and technology; and preparing for future priorities that use data, analytics and models.

The financial system makes an important contribution to the welfare of all Canadians. The ability of households and firms to confidently hold and transfer financial assets is one of the fundamental building blocks of the Canadian economy.

The Bank of Canada, along with the other sponsoring organizations1 of the International Journal of Central Banking (IJCB), today announced the publication of the journal's first issue and the launch of a website, hosted by the Bank for International Settlements.

Conference held on November 14 and 15, 2022.

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.

How can we assess the quality of a forecast? We propose a new benchmark to evaluate forecasts of temporally aggregated series and show that the real price of oil is more difficult to predict than we thought.