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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.

We identify two channels that affect the relationship between inflation and unemployment. First, inflation lowers wages because unemployed suffer more from inflation than employed, generating a positive relationship. Second, inflation increases firms’ financing costs, generating a negative relationship. Improvements in firm financing conditions can induce the relationship to switch signs.

Our understanding of news shocks is, to a large extent, based on studies that focus empirically on short-run news. This paper brings new insights by analyzing the effects of giant commodity discoveries, which typically materialize over the longer run.

Aggregate consumption impacts of heightened job risks during recessions can arise either from ex-ante responses to the fear of unemployment or from ex-post consumption declines due to realized income losses. We use survey-based perceptions of job risk and actual labor market transitions to quantify the relative contributions of these two channels. We further show that belief stickiness limits the extent of ex-ante insurance against job risks.

We develop a heterogeneous firm macro model with private information and quantify the aggregate relevance of asymmetric information. We find that a spike in private information account for 40% of the decline in aggregate investment during the 2007-2009 financial crisis and made monetary stimulus significantly less effective.

We introduce the Canadian Survey of Consumer Expectations indicator. This indicator provides a summary measure of consumer opinions that we can track over time. We construct three underlying sub-indexes—financial health, labour market and consumer spending—that capture different factors influencing consumers’ daily lives.

We provide an update on the state of the labour market, which has moved into modest excess supply. We also explore why wage growth measures remain elevated and how US trade policy could affect different parts of the labour market. We update the range of benchmarks in our dashboard of indicators.

This note presents the annual update of Bank of Canada staff estimates for growth in global potential output. These estimates served as key inputs to the analysis supporting the April 2025 Monetary Policy Report.

We explore two scenarios for potential output growth to gain insights into the economic consequences associated with different possible trade policies. Scenario 1 includes limited US tariffs on Canadian exports. Scenario 2 adds a permanent, broad-based 25% increase in US tariffs on imports from all countries excluding Canada and Mexico.

I study the welfare consequences of regulations on high-cost consumer credit in the United States and find that borrowing limits have distributional impacts on households with self-control issues.