AI Analysis: Currency outside banks and chartered bank deposits, month-end, Bank of Canada

Executive Summary

Statistics Canada's Table 10100112 provides a century of monthly Canadian monetary data spanning January 1926 to February 2026, tracking 74 distinct currency and deposit categories across 60,248 records worth up to 5.2 trillion CAD. The dataset reveals dramatic long-term growth in Canadian monetary aggregates, with values ranging from as low as 160 million CAD in early 1926 to over 53,691 million CAD for currency outside banks alone by late 2008, reflecting major economic events including the Great Depression, WWII, and the global financial crisis. Heavily right-skewed distributions and strong positive correlations among similar deposit categories underscore how a small number of large-value series — particularly chartered bank deposits — dominate Canada's monetary landscape.

Key Findings

• The dataset spans exactly 100 years (January 1926 – February 2026), comprising 1,202 monthly periods, 60,248 total records, and 74 unique monetary series tracked via 76 VECTOR identifiers.
• Values are extremely right-skewed, with a mean of ~199,243 million CAD versus a median of only 29,866 million CAD, and a standard deviation of 469,053 million CAD reflecting enormous variability across categories.
• The full value range extends from -112,783 million CAD (net adjustment positions) to 5,221,904 million CAD, with 75% of all records falling below 150,966 million CAD.
• The top 5 outliers for currency outside banks all occurred between August and December 2008, peaking at 53,691 million CAD in December 2008 (z-score of 3.11), directly linked to the global financial crisis cash demand surge.
• Notice deposits is the most consistently recorded category throughout the dataset's history, while Term Deposits is the most data-rich series by record count.
• Chartered bank deposits consistently dominate currency outside banks in average value, reflecting the modern banking system's reliance on deposit-based money over physical currency.
• The correlation heatmap confirms that similar monetary aggregate categories (e.g., different deposit types) cluster with strong positive correlations, while diverging color patterns highlight meaningful structural differences between currency and deposit segments.