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With some new tariff agreements in place, the range of trade policy outcomes has narrowed. Nevertheless, the situation remains fluid and difficult to predict. Canada’s economic outlook therefore continues to be highly dependant on assumptions about how US trade policy could unfold.

A regulator would want to restrict dividends to force banks to rebuild capital during a crisis. But such a policy is not time-consistent. A time-consistent policy would let banks gradually rebuild capital and pay dividends even when their equity remains below pre-crisis levels.

The trade conflict has made the outlook for the Canadian economy highly uncertain. There is a range of scenarios for how US trade policy could unfold, which leads to a wide range of outcomes for Canadian inflation and economic growth.

The existence of a market for Real Return Bonds in Canada provides a direct tool with which to measure market expectations of inflation by comparing the yields on these bonds with those on conventional Government of Canada long-term bonds. However, there are other factors besides inflation expectations that may affect the yield differential. After reviewing these factors, the authors note that they can lead to a potentially large bias in the level of inflation expectations. The changes in the differential over time may, nonetheless, be a good indicator of movements in long-run inflation expectations. Based on this measure, expectations of long-run inflation have declined since late 1994.

This note presents Segmented Inflation Dynamics (SID), a data-driven tool for assessing trend inflation. SID uses time-series segmentation to divide the price index into contiguous segments with stable inflation rates. Based on data through December 2025, SID indicates that Canada’s trend inflation has been near 2 percent since early 2024.

Liquidity creation is a fundamental function of banks. It provides the public with easy access to funds. These funds are important because they allow households and businesses to consume and invest. In this note, we measure liquidity creation by Canadian financial institutions from the first quarter of 2012 to the second quarter of 2019, using a methodology suggested by Berger and Bouwman (2009) and known as the BB measure.

Overall, Canadian households have proven resilient. But debt levels are elevated, and some pockets of stress remain. The potential impact on employment from ongoing trade uncertainty and geopolitical conflicts is a key concern.

At the end of 2024, global economic growth was solid, and inflation had eased further toward central banks’ targets. Since then, the United States has imposed large and broad-based tariffs on most of its trading partners.

In this issue of the Financial System Review, the Bank of Canada’s Governing Council judges that, although the Canadian finan­cial system is currently on a sound footing, risks to its stability remain elevated and have edged higher since December 2010.

Options markets offer unique insights into the changing risks different assets face, which helps us better understand the broader risks to the Canadian economy. We show how option prices help reveal that investors did not anticipate large downside risks to either major Canadian banks or economic growth during the March 2023 financial sector system stress, a period when policy-makers and investors were unsure of what the future held for Canada’s economy.