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The dramatic growth in China's exports of consumer goods such as clothing, toys, and electronics, and imports of primary commodities such as oil and metals is having major effects on global supply and demand. In examining China's role in global relative price changes, Francis finds that downward pressure on the relative prices of consumer goods is likely to persist as China's large labour supply continues its migration into manufacturing. Likewise, China's size and growth will also remain key drivers of global commodities demand for some time. Despite these forces, inflation-targeting central banks have the tools to keep inflation close to target, thus offsetting any persistent upward or downward inflationary pressure.

How much discretion should local financial regulators in a banking union have in accommodating local credit demand? I analyze this question in an economy where local regulators privately observe expected output from high lending. They do not fully internalize default costs from high lending since deposit insurance cannot be priced fairly.

Household savings in Canada have increased significantly since 2019, especially among homeowners without a mortgage. We assess how savings buffers can mitigate households’ financial risk in relation to asset repricing, mortgage payment renewal and unemployment.

This article reviews recent work that uses principal-component analysis to extract information common to indicators from the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey (BOS). The authors use correlation analysis and an out-of-sample forecasting exercise to assess and compare the information content of the principal component with that of responses to key individual survey questions on growth in real gross domestic product and in real business investment. Results suggest that summarizing the common movements among BOS indicators may provide useful information for forecasting near-term growth in business investment. For growth in real gross domestic product, however, the survey’s balance of opinion on future sales growth appears to be more informative.

Standard theories of price adjustment are based on the problem of a single-product firm, and therefore they may not be well suited to analyze price dynamics in the economy with multiproduct firms.

We explain how housing supply elasticities for Canadian cities are estimated. The procedure we use exploits the systematic differences in various cities’ sensitivity to regional house-price cycles.

We report on the dynamics of Bitcoin awareness and ownership from 2016 to 2021, using the Bank of Canada's Bitcoin Omnibus Surveys (BTCOS). Our analysis also helps understand Bitcoin owners who adopted during the COVID-19 and how they differ from long-term owners. 

Deputy Governor Lawrence Schembri discusses the historical evolution and future prospects for Canadian exports.

We analyze the impact of interest rate policy on financial stability in an environment where banks can experience runs on their short-term liabilities, forcing them to sell assets at fire-sale prices.

This report highlights how an effective resolution regime promotes financial stability. It does this by ensuring that financial market infrastructures (FMIs) would be able to continue to provide their critical functions during a period of stress when an FMI’s own recovery measures were failing. The report explains the Bank of Canada’s new role as the resolution authority for FMIs, which will further bolster financial system resilience.