We review the nascent but fast-growing literature on central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), focusing on their potential impacts on private banks. We evaluate these impacts in three areas of traditional banking: payments, lending, and liquidity and maturity transformation. For each area, we...

A well-functioning monetary system is characterized by public and private forms of money that exchange at par as value flows freely between them. This is essential for efficient transacting and contracting in a market economy. A relevant retail public money - whether in the form of cash, a...

We present a policy framework for electronic money and payments. The framework poses a set of positive questions related to the areas of responsibility of central banks: payments systems, monetary policy and financial stability. The questions are posed to four broad forms of e-money: privately...

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...

We investigate the risks and opportunities to the mandates of central banks arising from fintech developments. Fintech may affect the different areas of responsibility of central banks - mainly monetary policy and financial stability - by changing money demand and by changing the industrial...

In this paper we discuss the competition and innovation arguments for issuing a central bank digital currency (CBDC). A CBDC could be an effective competition policy tool for payments. On innovation, we argue that a CBDC could be necessary to support the vibrancy of the digital economy by...

A new wholesale payments system will launch in Canada in 2021. This real-time gross settlement system called Lynx will have two types of settlement mechanisms, one allowing offsetting and the other not. This paper studies the decision problem of the Bank of Canada: which of the two settlement...

This paper presents simulation results for Canada's new large-value payments system: Lynx. We simulate the settlement process of Lynx using a large sample of payments observed in the current system (LVTS), taking the initial level of liquidity as given. We calculate the resulting liquidity...

For an intermediated central bank digital currency (CBDC) to be successful, central banks will need to develop sustainable economic models where intermediaries and end users derive value and central banks achieve their policy goals. This note presents a framework for analyzing different economic...