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Proceedings of a conference held by the Bank of Canada, June 2003 (proceedings volume, available in electronic format only) (A Festschrift in Honour of Charles Freedman)

CAG was established by the Bank of Canada to review and advise on repo market functioning and CORRA methodology.

This report presents the details of a new semi-annual survey that will improve the Bank of Canada’s surveillance across the financial system and deepen efforts to engage with financial system participants. The survey collects expert opinions on the risks to and resilience of the Canadian financial system as well as on emerging trends and financial innovations. The report presents an overview of the survey and provides high-level results from the spring 2018 survey.

Summary results of a survey of activity in Canadian foreign exchange and derivatives markets conducted by the Bank of Canada in April 2004 are now available. Similar surveys were undertaken in 51 other countries during the same month, and the central banks of many of those countries are also releasing their results today.

Deputy Governor John Murray discusses global growth and rebalancing.

This supervisory policy sets out the Bank’s approach to online marketplaces and explains when their activities fall within the scope of the Retail Payment Activities Act.

The Bank of Canada today announced that it is raising its target for the overnight rate by one-quarter of one percentage point to 3 1/4 per cent.

This article draws on theory and empirical evidence to examine a number of factors behind movements in Canadian house prices. It begins with an overview of the movements in house prices in Canada, using regional data to highlight factors that influence prices over the long run. It then turns to the central theme, that there are medium-run movements in prices not accounted for by long-run factors. Drawing on recent Bank of Canada research, the article discusses several factors behind these medium-run movements, including interest rates, expected price appreciation and market liquidity. The article concludes by identifying areas for future research that would further our understanding of fluctuations in house prices.

Economists in the nineteenth century spent considerable time discussing the merits of a free-banking system, in which each commercial bank would be able to issue its own notes and deposits, subject to a convertibility requirement backed by its own gold reserves. Such a system, the proponents argued, would be able to deliver price-level stability yet be flexible enough to withstand the vicissitudes of the business cycle. Moreover, there would be no need for central banks. While this idea has received less attention in recent years, some economists still put it forward as a practical alternative to the current system. Laidler suggests that the centralizing tendencies in banking would inevitably undermine competition within a free-banking system, and lead to the natural emergence of one dominant bank. Other developments in the twentieth century, most notably the demise of the gold standard and widespread agreement that governments should play a determining role in setting monetary policy goals, have also limited the practicality of such a system. Laidler examines the Bank of Canada's history from the free-banking perspective and concludes that the current system of inflation targeting provides a much better anchor for orderly price-level behaviour than the free-banking system's convertibility could ever guarantee.