Paul Beaudry: Our quantitative easing operations - looking under the hood

Remarks (delivered virtually) by Mr Paul Beaudry, Deputy Governor of the Bank of Canada, to the Greater Moncton Chamber of Commerce, the Fredericton Chamber of Commerce, and the Saint John Region Chamber of Commerce, Fredericton, New Brunswick, Moncton, New Brunswick, Saint John, New Brunswick, 10 December 2020.

The views expressed in this speech are those of the speaker and not the view of the BIS.

Introduction

Good afternoon and thank you very much for the kind introduction, John.

I'm really pleased to have the opportunity to talk with all of you today-even if we are doing so virtually and from opposite coasts. I'm now a resident of Canada's west coast, but I hold fond memories of time spent vacationing in the Maritimes from my home town of Québec.

As you know, the Bank made the decision yesterday to maintain our target for the overnight rate at 0.25 percent, and we'll spend some time discussing that later. But first, I want to talk about some of our actions to address COVID-19 and the immense challenges this pandemic poses to the financial well-being of Canadians.

Since the pandemic hit in March, we have taken swift and decisive actions to help Canadian households and businesses bridge this short-term crisis. But we are also concerned with providing a strong foundation for longer-term recovery.

In the face of the pandemic, we lowered our policy interest rate to 0.25 percent to ensure lower borrowing costs for households and businesses. We have committed to maintaining our policy rate at the current level until our inflation objective is achieved.