A measure of the neutral policy interest rate can be used to gauge the stance of monetary policy. We define the neutral rate as the real policy rate consistent with output at its potential level and inflation equal to target after the effects of all cyclical shocks have dissipated. This is a...

This paper presents Bank of Canada staff's current assessment of the US neutral rate, along with a newly developed set of models on which that assessment is based. The overall assessment is that the US neutral rate currently lies in a range of 1.75 to 2.75 percent. This represents a decline of...

The payments landscape in Canada is rapidly changing and will continue to evolve, fuelled by strong and persistent drivers. In Canada, the Canadian Payments Association (CPA) is on a path to modernize Canada's core payment systems. This paper contributes to the discussion in three ways. First,...

As Canada continues to engage in a dialogue to develop the approach to modernizing its core payment systems, we analyze the core payment systems that exist in countries around the world. We study payment systems in 27 jurisdictions, encompassing a broad range of geographic regions, through three...

Digital currencies have attracted strong interest in recent years and have the potential to become widely adopted for use in making payments. Public authorities and central banks around the world are closely monitoring developments in digital currencies and studying their implications for the...

The authors review recent developments in retail payments in Canada and elsewhere, with a focus on e-money products, and assess their potential public policy implications. In particular, they study how these developments will affect the demand for bank notes, and the central bank's balance sheet...

As currently articulated, the monetary sovereignty argument for central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) rests on the idea that without them, private and foreign digital monies could displace domestic currencies (a process called currency substitution), threatening the central bank's monetary...

Providing bank notes is one of the Bank of Canada’s core functions. The Bank is therefore interested in whether cash is adequately distributed across society, and this also influences the Bank’s thinking on issuing a central bank digital currency. We provide a perspective on these issues by...

Chen et al. (2021) show that almost one-third of First Nations band offices in Canada are within 1 kilometre (km) of an automated banking machine (ABM) or financial institution (FI) branch and more than half are within 5 km. Further, over three-quarters of band offices are within 20 km of an ABM...

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...