Another $23 billion of Canadian government bonds matured off the Bank of Canada balance sheet on May 1:
What’s interesting is that the Government of Canada ordinarily will receive a lot of tax remissions by April 30. In the past couple years, between the last April data point and the first May data point, the number spiked up about $10 billion, but this time the amount was up less than a billion dollars. Spend, spend, spend!
The $182 billion in bank reserves remaining continue to earn member institutions a very adequate 4.5% deposit rate – I’m sure the public really loves the annualized $8.2 billion dollars (that’s about $210 per Canadian!) being graciously donated to the big banks, risk-free. Why bother lending money to customers when you can get it so good from the BoC?
The next few slabs of QT are $6 billion on June 1, $9 billion on August 1, and $24 billion on September 1.