AI Analysis: Chartered banks, assets and liabilities, month-end, Bank of Canada

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 10100109 provides 80 years of monthly chartered bank balance sheet data spanning January 1946 to February 2026, covering 114 asset and liability categories across 100,855 rows with values ranging from -$102,494M to over $5.4 trillion CAD. Total Major Assets grew from just $5,810M in 1946 to a peak of $3.43 trillion in August 2020, reflecting decades of sustained banking sector expansion punctuated by crisis-driven surges. The dataset's strongly right-skewed distribution — where the mean of $141,632M is more than 10 times the median of $13,114M — underscores how a small number of dominant categories such as total assets, total liabilities, and major loan and deposit aggregates drive the overall balance sheet.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans 962 months from January 1946 to February 2026, covering 114 distinct asset and liability categories across 100,855 rows, with nearly all values (99,979) recorded in millions of Canadian dollars.
• Total Major Assets grew from $5,810M in June 1946 to a peak of $3,433,968M (over $3.4 trillion) in August 2020 — a roughly 590-fold increase driven by long-term banking growth and COVID-19 emergency measures.
• The value distribution is heavily right-skewed, with a mean of $141,632M versus a median of $13,114M, and an IQR of $89,844M (Q25: $1,508M to Q75: $91,352M), indicating that most entries are modest while a few very large categories dominate.
• Seven IQR-based statistical outliers were detected across the top 5 asset/liability categories, with the most extreme fluctuations found in Government Deposits, which surged +741% year-over-year in January 1954 and fell -83.6% in October 1950.
• Correlation analysis across 15 key categories over 801 monthly periods shows that most balance sheet items are strongly positively correlated, as they collectively expand with the overall size of the banking sector over time.
• Negative values as low as -$102,494M are present in the dataset, reflecting liability or net position entries in certain categories, while the maximum value of $5,402,686M highlights the enormous scale of Canada's modern chartered banking system.
• The 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic are both clearly identifiable as anomalous spikes in year-over-year growth charts, marking the two most significant structural disruptions to Canadian bank balance sheets in recent decades.