Bank of Canada Gives Up on Commercial Paper & Bankers Acceptance Statistics

The Bank of Canada has announced (on 2018-11-13):

As of January 2019, the Bank of Canada will no longer publish the daily, weekly or monthly prime commercial paper (CP) or bankers’ acceptance (BA) rates. This decision has been taken after a thorough review of these rates and in keeping with the Bank’s policy of only publishing reliable data using appropriate sources and calculation methodologies.

The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) will start publishing for informational purposes only the 1- and 3-month transaction based BA rates on the same date. These new BA rates will be publicly available on the IIROC’s website on a delayed basis IIROC’s website.

The historical data for these rates will continue to be available on the Bank of Canada website at the Selected Historical Interest Rates page.

For further inquiries contact Bank of Canada at communications@bankofcanada.ca or IIROC Victoria Pinnington vpinnington@iiroc.ca

Naturally, given the secretive nature of the BoC, details of this review are not linked.

I also note their statement that:

The final publication of the “Selected Historical Interest Rates” package will be in January 2019, and on July 31, 2019 the page will be removed from the Bank of Canada’s website. After that date DSOCapitalMarkets@bankofcanada.ca will be pleased to respond to requests for publications.

Please note that you can find all the historical data through Statistics Canada’s CANSIM repository in tables 10-10-0122-01 and 10-10-0123-01, and data for the last ten years on the Canadian Interest Rates, Bond Yields, Treasury Bills and U.S. Interest Rates pages on our website. For a full mapping of the various time series and their new locations please refer to the attached document.

I have sent the following eMail to the Bank:

Sirs,

I understand from your website notice (https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2018/11/changes-to-publication-of-interest-rate-statistics/ ) that the BoC will no longer publish indicative CP or BA rates due to “the Bank’s policy of only publishing reliable data using appropriate sources and calculation methodologies” following “a thorough review of these rates”.

I have two questions regarding this policy change:
i) will this review be published, or is it available on request?
ii) I note that you continue to publish Series “V80691335: Conventional mortgage – 5-year”, claiming that it has not varied in the past five weeks from the nonsensical claim of “5.34%”, a figure that appears to be based on the commercial banks’ “posted rate”, which bears no relationship to actual rates in the marketplace (see, e.g., https://www.ratehub.ca/best-mortgage-rates/5-year/fixed ). Why do you consider the rates you publish to be ” reliable data using appropriate sources and calculation methodologies”?

Sincerely,

Well … I’ll give them a chance to answer. But I suspect that this termination of service is a disgraceful disservice to Canadians, and just another gift to Our Glorious Banks that will assist them to exploit their practical hegemony over the Canadian financial system for commercial purposes.

Update, 2019-1-17: I have received an answer from the BoC:

Good day,

Thank you for your email.

i) The Bank does not plan on releasing this review publicly.

ii) The methodology for calculating the Chartered Bank Interest Rates: Conventional mortgage – 5 year rate (weekly series V80691335 and monthly series V122521) published by the Bank of Canada is the statistical mode of 5-year mortgage rates posted by the Big Six Canadian banks. This rate is designated as a benchmark qualifying rate for the debt service ratio calculations in the mortgage approval process.

If the client’s analytical needs are better met by effective/charged interest rates, could you please point him to the ‘Interest rates for new and existing household lending’ table on the Banking and Financial Statistics web page: https://www.bankofcanada.ca/rates/banking-and-financial-statistics/interest-rates-for-new-and-existing-household-lending/

Kind regards,

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.