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Canada’s potential output growth is anticipated to slow due to declining population growth and the ongoing trade conflict. The range for Canada’s neutral interest rate lies between 2.25% and 3.25%.

The Reports section of the Financial System Review examines selected issues of relevance to the Canadian and global financial systems. The June 2015 issue features two reports summarizing recent work by Bank of Canada staff on specific financial sector policies.

This paper studies the period in Canada when both private bank notes and government-issued notes (Dominion notes) were simultaneously in circulation. Because both of these notes shared many of the characteristics of today's digital currencies, the experience with these notes can be used to draw lessons about how digital currencies might perform.

This monthly newsletter features the latest research publications by Bank of Canada economists including external publications and working papers published on the Bank of Canada’s website.

In an increasingly digitalized world, issuers of private digital currency can weaken central banks’ ability to stabilize the economy. By continuing to make central bank money attractive as a payment instrument in a digital world, a central bank digital currency (CDBC) could help to maintain a country’s monetary sovereignty.

The consumption boom-bust cycle in the 2000s coincided with large fluctuations in the volume of home equity borrowing. Contrary to conventional wisdom, I show that homeowners largely borrowed for residential investment and not consumption.

We apply two machine learning algorithms to forecast monthly growth of house prices and existing homes sales in Canada. Although the algorithms can sometimes outperform a linear model, the improvement in forecast accuracy is not always statistically significant.

We share insights from Canadian data from 2002 to 2022 that the Bank of Canada collected. The Bank submits these data each year to the Financial Stability Board for inclusion in its Global Monitoring Report on Non-Bank Financial Intermediation.

Recent evidence finds a positive association between the prevalence of loans of inferior quality and the growth in securitized products. Some attribute this development to the lack of incentives for originators to screen and monitor the performance of securitized loans; others stress that certain factors, such as balance-sheet management, also contributed to the problem, making it difficult to pin down the reason for the proliferation of such loans during the period of high securitization growth. The author reviews the conflicts of interest between participants in the securitization process that contributed to the ongoing financial turmoil and highlights the most recent policy measures and potential solutions for ameliorating these agency issues.

We present the R package MSTest, which implements hypothesis testing procedures to determine the number of regimes in Markov switching models. The package provides several testing frameworks, including Monte Carlo likelihood ratio tests, moment-based tests, parameter stability tests, and classical likelihood ratio procedures.