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Following changes to housing finance policies that target insured mortgages, uninsured mortgage credit has been growing. This robust growth creates a larger pool of mortgages that may be suitable for private-label residential mortgage-backed securities (RMBS).

Until recently, there have been few efforts to systematically measure and aggregate the nominal value of the different types of sovereign government debt in default. To help fill this gap, the Bank of Canada’s Credit Rating Assessment Group (CRAG) has developed a comprehensive database of sovereign defaults posted on the Bank of Canada’s website that now is updated in partnership with the Bank of England.

Mutual funds employ a host of tools to manage redemption run risk. However, our results suggest that Canadian corporate bond funds may be vulnerable to redemption runs, especially when they are less liquid and when market volatility is high.

In this note, we explore two types of risk faced by holders of mortgages and home equity lines of credit (HELOCs) in the context of rising interest rates: interest rate risk and renewal risk.

Aggregate non-financial corporate debt-to-GDP has been growing rapidly in recent years and is at an all-time high. This growth began in 2011 and accelerated as the oil price shock affected the Canadian economy.

When investors redeem their fund shares for cash, fixed-income fund managers can choose whether to draw on their liquid holdings or sell bonds in the secondary market. We analyze the liquidity-management decisions of Canadian corporate bond mutual funds, focusing on the strategies they use to meet investor redemptions.

We explore properties of asymmetric generalized autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (GARCH) models in the threshold GARCH (GTARCH) family and propose a more general Spline-GTARCH model, which captures high-frequency return volatility, low-frequency macroeconomic volatility as well as an asymmetric response to past negative news in both autoregressive conditional heteroscedasticity (ARCH) and GARCH terms.

We draw a parallel between the dramatic increases of systematic variations in exchange rates and international bank lending. We find that when a country’s currency has a larger share of systematic variations, lending flows by international banks to that country become more sensitive to global lending - they also become more systematic. This parallel is particularly prevalent for large commodity exporters, including Canada. Global financial intermediation may open a new channel between the real economy and exchange rates.

Financial system vulnerabilities increase the downside risk to future GDP growth. Macroprudential tightening significantly reduces financial stability risks associated with vulnerabilities. Monetary policy faces a trade-off between financial stability and macroeconomic risks.

In this work, we use novel Canadian survey data to study how expectations of future changes in house prices are influenced by personal experiences. We find that recently experienced changes in local house prices are routinely extrapolated into expectations of year-ahead changes in national house prices.