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The Canadian Collateral Management Service (CCMS) is a new tri-party collateral management service offered by the TMX Group and Clearstream. CCMS will enhance Canada’s financial infrastructure for securities financing transactions, including for the repurchase, or repo, market that is a core funding market in Canada. We explain the importance of the repo market and describe the benefits of the CCMS for market participants and for the Bank of Canada.

From the end of 2008 to the middle of last year, Canada experienced a short, sharp recession. With the exception of government spending, all major components of aggregate demand declined, and industrial production dropped 15 per cent. Canadian exporters suffered particularly, owing to the sharp fall in the components of U.S. economic activity that matter most for Canada.

The Bank’s internal credit risk assessment abilities are regularly enhanced. In this note, we present a recent innovation that extends the set of market-based indicators used in the credit risk assessment of financial counterparties.

Effective 1 November 2003, the Bank of Canada abandoned its practice of backdating the results of settlement of payments through the Automated Clearing Settlement System (ACSS). It has adopted instead a system of "next-day" settlement under which the results of the settlement process will appear on the central bank's books on the day the items actually settle in the ACSS. Since July 1986, settlement of these items had occurred at noon the day after items were presented for clearing, but the results were recognized on the Bank's books the previous day, through backdating, or "retroactive" settlement. The new system should simplify the payments process and improve the reporting of settlement risk, as well as promote cost-effectiveness within the payments systems. ACSS participants have agreed among themselves to implement an interest-compensation mechanism in order to avoid imposing a float charge on their customer base.

The technology behind blockchain has attracted a lot of attention. However, this technology is for the most part not well understood. There is no consensus on what benefits it may bring or on how it may fail.

In Toward More Resilient Markets: Over-the-Counter Derivatives Reform in Canada, Michael Mueller and André Usche show that the implementation of derivatives market reforms in Canada is well under way and has lessened vulnerabilities. But accompanying changes to market structure have both positive and negative effects that require ongoing attention from authorities.

This article summarizes the proceedings of a conference hosted by the Bank of Canada in November 1995. The conference examined the interaction between monetary policy operations and the money market. It provided an opportunity to assess current operations before the introduction of a large-value transfer system leads the Bank to change the techniques it uses to implement monetary policy on a day-to-day basis. From the Bank's perspective, the papers prepared externally provided some useful insights into recent innovations in money markets and their implications for the implementation of monetary policy. Meanwhile, the sessions devoted to the Bank's operations in financial markets were designed to provide market practitioners and academics with further insight into how the Bank operates in these markets.

Deputy Governor Tim Lane talks about the Bank’s latest interest rate announcement and discusses how the digital transformation has supported resilience through the pandemic and may be adding to the economy’s growth potential.

Using the microdata underlying the Canadian consumer price index, we study how often and by how much firms changed their prices during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that the surge in inflation was mainly associated with retailers raising prices much more often than before. We also find that more recently, corporate price-setting behaviour appears to be approaching pre-pandemic norms.

The Canadian economy continues to adjust to developments in the global economy.