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Since last summer, many of us here today have been preoccupied with the ongoing dislocations in financial markets. What began in securities linked to U.S. subprime mortgages has spread to a broad range of structured assets, conventional credit markets, and, to a lesser extent, equities.

Although the global financial system continues to recover gradually from the unprecedented dislocations experienced in recent years, significant downside risks remain. Market concerns over acute fiscal strains in some euro-area countries have intensified sharply in recent weeks.

FSR Highlights - December 2010

This paper examines the implications of positive news about future asset values that turn out to be incorrect at a later date in an open economy model with banking. The model captures the patterns of bank credit and current account dynamics in Spain between 2000 and 2010. The model finds that the use of unconventional policies leads to a milder bust.

How should policy be designed at high debt levels, when fiscal authorities have little room to adjust taxes? Assigning the monetary authority a role in achieving debt sustainability makes it less effective in stabilizing inflation and output.

This paper studies the effects of foreign exchange (FX) interventions in a two-region model where governments issue both short- and long-term bonds. We find that the term premium channel dominates the trade balance channel in our calibrated model. As a result, the conventional beggar-thy-neighbor effects of interventions are overturned.

Unusually large revisions to CPI-common in recent months stem from increased common movements across consumer price index components amid broad inflationary pressures. With recent revisions, CPI-common is more closely aligned with the Bank of Canada’s other two preferred measures of core inflation. However, caution is necessary when interpreting real-time estimates of CPI-common in the current environment.

Over the past 25 years, world long-term interest rates have declined to levels not seen since the 1960s. This decline has been accompanied by falling world investment and savings rates. The authors explore global saving and investment outcomes that have led to the fall in the world real interest rate. The results show that the key factors explaining movements in savings and investment are variables that evolve relatively slowly over time, such as labour force growth and the age structure of the world economy. The conclusions suggest that, over the coming years, it is unlikely that these slowly changing variables will be a source of significant changes in world real interest rates.

In 2015, TSX Alpha, a Canadian stock exchange, implemented a speed bump for marketable orders and an inverted fee structure as part of a redesign. We find no evidence that this redesign impacted market-wide measures of trading costs or contributed appreciably to segmenting retail order flow away from other Canadian venues with a maker-taker fee structure.

Perceived income risks reported in a survey of consumer expectations are more heterogeneous and, on average, lower than indirectly calibrated risks based on panel data. They prove to be one explanation for why a large fraction of households hold very little liquid savings and why accumulated wealth is widely unequal across households.

Based on empirical evidence, I propose a dynamic stochastic general equilibrium model with two financial sectors to analyze the role of corporate debt composition (bank versus bond financing) in the transmission of economic shocks.