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Readers of this blog will have hopefully read my report “The Big Banks’ Big Secret”, which examines the $114 billion that Canada’s banks received during the 2008-09 financial crisis. The report’s major finding was that at some point during the crisis, three of Canada’s five big banks had received support worth more than their market capitalization, or the value of all the stock, at around $20-25 billion per bank.
As I noted in the report, both the Bank of Canada and CMHC have refused to release the secret details of their support programs including how much each bank got, when they got it and what they put forth as collateral. Canadians are still not allowed to know how much each bank received.
Some researchers have requested the full dataset that stood behind the report. I also wanted to make it publicly available here, so that others can freely use it in their own research on bank supports during the crisis. Hopefully, it can lead to determining why some banks needed so much more relative support than others and how we might improve the banking system in the future.
