As part of managing a debt portfolio, debt managers face the challenging task of choosing a strategy that minimizes the cost of debt, subject to limitations on risk. The Bank of Canada provides debt-management analysis and advice to the Government of Canada to assist in this task, with the...

Since the financial crisis, attention has focused on central counterparties (CCPs) as a solution to systemic risk for a variety of financial markets, ranging from repurchase agreements and options to swaps. However, internationally accepted standards and the academic literature have left...

The author uses a quantitative network analysis approach to assess how participants in the Large Value Transfer System (LVTS) respond to partial outages at other banks. Despite the limited number of operational events, benchmarks can be established. For example, the effect of a partial outage at...

In emerging-market economies, real exchange rate adjustment is critical for maintaining a sustainable current account position and thereby for helping to reduce macroeconomic and financial instability. The authors examine empirically two related hypotheses: (i) that real exchange rate...

The authors use simulations within the BoC-GEM-FIN, the Bank of Canada’s version of the Global Economy Model with financial frictions in both the demand and supply sides of the credit market, to investigate the macroeconomic implications of changing bank regulations on the Canadian economy....

This paper explores the reliability of using prices of credit default swap contracts (CDS) as indicators of default probabilities during the 2007/2008 financial crisis. We use data from the Canadian financial system to show that these publicly available risk measures, while indicative of initial...

The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we provide a detailed social accounting matrix (SAM), which incorporates the income and financial flows into the standard input-output matrix, for the Canadian economy for 2004. Second, we use the SAM to assess the strength of the real-financial...

We address some of the key questions that arise in forecasting the price of crude oil. What do applied forecasters need to know about the choice of sample period and about the tradeoffs between alternative oil price series and model specifications? Are real or nominal oil prices predictable...

We construct a monthly real-time data set consisting of vintages for 1991.1-2010.12 that is suitable for generating forecasts of the real price of oil from a variety of models. We document that revisions of the data typically represent news, and we introduce backcasting and nowcasting techniques...

In this paper, we define a financial institution’s contribution to financial systemic risk as the increase in financial systemic risk conditional on the crash of the financial institution. The higher the contribution is, the more systemically important is the institution for the system. Based...