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In August 2012, the New York Stock Exchange launched the Retail Liquidity Program (RLP), a trading facility that enables participating organizations to quote dark limit orders executable only by retail traders.

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.

A consultation document on issues relating to the design and operation of government debt programs for fiscal year 2003/04 and beyond, prepared jointly by the Department of Finance and the Bank of Canada, was published today. Debt-strategy planning is based on the fiscal outlook in the 2002 Economic and Fiscal Update released 30 October 2002, which projects that government borrowing in financial markets will remain near current levels.

The LVTS is an electronic network for sending and receiving large-value payments. It is expected to become operational in the first half of 1999. Major chartered banks and other large deposit-taking institutions will provide access to the system for their clients in the financial, corporate and government sectors. Canada’s LVTS exceeds world standards for risk control in large-value systems. The author explains how this is achieved through the netting, bilateral and multilateral credit limits, collateral, and loss-sharing procedures used in the event of a default, and, as a last resort, a guarantee by the Bank of Canada. The LVTS gives participating institutions certainty of settlement for their LVTS positions every day, even if one or more participants default. This greatly reduces systemic risk in the financial system. Moreover, the LVTS supports finality of payment; that is, it makes funds unconditionally and irrevocably available to the receiver. Finality is highly desirable when the amount of the payment is substantial, or when exact timing is critical. Since the LVTS will carry the great majority of the value of all payments in Canada, it should be considered the core of the national payments system.

As announced in the 2003 Budget, the Government will gradually reduce the fixed-rate portion of the debt from two-thirds to 60 per cent. The reduction will begin in the upcoming fiscal year and will be implemented in an orderly and transparent manner over the next five years to maintain a well-functioning Government of Canada securities market.

This supplementary material is intended to provide an overview of the Safeguarding end-user funds guideline and summarizes a payment service provider’s (PSP) requirements for safeguarding end-user funds. It also includes scope considerations and a list of questions to help PSPs assess and achieve these requirements.

We model the introduction of a new payment method, e.g., e-money, that competes with an existing payment method, e.g., cash. The new payment method involves relatively lower per-transaction costs for both buyers and sellers, but sellers must pay a fixed fee to accept the new payment method.

This article by the Bank's Web master details the development of the Bank's Web site and highlights some of its special features. It includes a description of dataBANK, a custom-built interface to the Bank's economic databases that gives visitors access to 220 data series. It also provides a mini tour of monetary policy material "on site," as well as a taste of things to come. Above all, this article invites you to come and visit our site.

When constrained by the zero lower bound, some central banks have communicated a threshold that must be met before short-term interest rates would be permitted to rise. Simulation results for Canada show that forward guidance that is conditional on achieving a price-level threshold can theoretically raise demand and inflation expectations by significantly more than unemployment thresholds. This superior performance is attributable to the fact that the price-level threshold depends on past inflation outcomes. In practice, however, history-dependent thresholds such as this might be more challenging for central banks to communicate.