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The Bank of Canada recently launched a quarterly survey to measure the expectations of Canadian households: the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations (CSCE). The data collected provide comprehensive information about consumer expectations for and uncertainty about inflation, the labour market and household finance. This article describes the CSCE and illustrates its potential to offer rich information about Canadian consumers for researchers and policy-makers.

Central banks are still defining their approach to financial stability and are at an early stage in the development of useful models. The Bank of Canada's 2007 economic conference was organized to stimulate progress in the development of financial-stability frameworks. Among the highlights reported here are the discussions centred around three proposed frameworks: a contingent-claims-analysis framework, a semi-structural framework, and structural financial-stability models. Participants also reported on their experiences with stress-testing under the International Monetary Fund's Financial Sector Assessment Program and discussed the implications for financial stability of linkages among payment, clearing, and settlement systems.

We conduct a large-scale survey to shed light on what people believe about public finance. An experiment demonstrates that central bank communication can persistently shift views on monetary financing. It further suggests that views on monetary financing impact support for fiscal discipline.

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.

Stress testing is an important tool used by financial authorities and entities around the world to evaluate potential risks to the financial system. Kartik Anand, Guillaume Bédard-Pagé and Virginie Traclet discuss different stress-testing approaches, with emphasis on the innovative and analytically rigorous model developed by the Bank of Canada: the MacroFinancial Risk Assessment Framework (MFRAF). They also present the stress-test results obtained in the context of the 2013 Canada Financial Sector Assessment Program led by the International Monetary Fund, including the important contributions made by the use of MFRAF in the exercise.

How are your past, current and future earnings related to those of your parents? We explore this by using 37 years of Canadian tax data on two generations.

Using micro data from the U.S. Consumer Expenditure Survey and Current Population Survey, I document that government spending shocks affect individuals differently over the life cycle.

We find that the rise in Government of Canada debt issuance correlates to growing participation of hedge funds in bond auctions since 2020. This increased participation supports the cost-effective distribution of Canada’s debt, but it also represents a potential vulnerability because hedge funds have a greater flight risk than other investor types.