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As the ultimate provider of Canadian-dollar liquidity to the financial system, the Bank of Canada has the unique capacity to create Canadian-dollar claims on the central bank and the power to make secured loans or advances to chartered banks and other members of the Canadian Payments Association. The Bank supplies overnight credit on a routine basis through the Standing Liquidity Facility (SLF) to direct participants in the Large Value Transfer System, and Emergency Lending Assistance (ELA) to solvent deposit-taking institutions that require more substantial and prolonged credit. The authors review the policy framework that guides the Bank's lender-of-last-resort function, including the key issues, terms and conditions, and eligibility criteria associated with its SLF and ELA activities. Also discussed are foreign currency ELA, the relationship between SLF and ELA, systemic risk and Bank of Canada intervention, and the potential provision of liquidity to major clearing and settlement systems.

A variety of technology designs could support retail central bank digital currency (CBDC) systems. We develop five archetypes of CBDC systems, outline their characteristics and discuss their trade-offs. This work serves as a framework to analyze and compare different designs, independent of vendor, platform and implementation.

We consider introducing an expiry date for offline digital currency balances. Consumers whose digital cash expired would automatically receive the funds back into their online account. This functionality could increase demand for digital cash, with the time to expiry playing a key role.

Governor Mark Carney discusses current financial system reform initiatives in a speech to the Institute of International Finance.

The sharp depreciation of the Canadian dollar and the successful launch of the euro have sparked a lively debate in Canada about the possible benefits of formally adopting the U.S. dollar as our national currency. Some observers have suggested that this debate is largely irrelevant, since Canada is already highly "dollarized." Canadian businesses and households, they assert, often use the U.S. dollar to perform standard money functions in preference to their own currency. Very little evidence has been provided, however, to support these claims. The authors review the available data with a view to drawing some tentative conclusions about the extent to which Canada has already been informally dollarized. The evidence suggests that many of the concerns that have been expressed about the imminent demise of the Canadian dollar have been misplaced. The Canadian dollar continues to be used as the principal unit of account, medium of exchange, and store of value within our borders. Moreover, there is no indication that dollarization is likely to take hold in the foreseeable future. Indeed, in many respects, the Canadian economy is less dollarized now than it was 20 years ago.

The recent dislocations in credit markets have brought these issues into sharp focus. Among other things, the market turbulence has highlighted the critical role that confidence and liquidity play in financial markets.

Privacy is a key aspect of a potential central bank digital currency system. We outline different technical choices to enact various privacy models while complying with the appropriate regulations. We develop a framework to evaluate privacy models and list key risks and trade-offs in privacy design.

It goes without saying that a sound system of private pensions is important from the perspective of pensioners who rely on a given plan for their retirement income. For firms, a pension plan can help to attract and retain staff, and so the business community also counts on a sound pension system.

Over the past year, both private sector financial market participants and public sector authorities have been preoccupied with the topic of liquidity as never before. Throughout the financial market turbulence, private liquidity management has become tremendously important.