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This note examines the costs of the Government of Canada bond buyback and switch programs between 1998 and 2016. Our analysis indicates that the auction design of the buyback program was effective in retiring government debt with minimal costs resulting from bid shading in auctions and price impact.

This paper presents four blue-sky ideas for lowering the cost of the Government of Canada’s debt without increasing the debt’s risk profile. We argue that each idea would improve the secondary-market liquidity of government debt, thereby increasing the demand for government bonds and thus lowering their cost at issuance.

This discussion paper is the third in the Financial Markets Department’s series on the structure of Canadian financial markets. These papers are called “ecologies” because they study the interactions among market participants, infrastructures, regulations and the terms of the traded contract itself.

This paper finds that Government of Canada benchmark bonds tend to be more illiquid over the subsequent month when there is a large increase in government debt supply. The result is both statistically and economically significant, stronger for the long-term than the short-term sector, and is robust when other macro factors are controlled for.

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.

We present the daily time series of the outstanding amounts of all Government of Canada marketable debt securities from July 2001 to June 2017.

This paper documents the properties of Government of Canada securities in cash, repo and securities lending transactions over their life cycle. By tracking every security from issuance to maturity, we are able to highlight inter-linkages between the markets for cash and for specific securities.

This analytical note evaluates the reliability of proxies for measuring liquidity in Canadian bond markets. We find that price-impact and bid-ask proxies paint a similar picture of evolving liquidity conditions to that obtained from richer measures of liquidity for benchmark Government of Canada bonds.

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.

The investment of foreign exchange reserves or other asset portfolios requires an assessment of the credit quality of investment counterparties. Traditionally, foreign exchange reserve and asset managers have relied on credit rating agencies (CRAs) as the main source for credit assessments.