us that companies always find ways to cope and innovate in the face of such challenges. we want to know how companies are dealing with uncertainty and the upheaval in the global trading system. we want to know if you are rethinking the value chains that you built in the past. if so, we want to know what kinds of alternative arrangements you are putting in place and what that may mean for productivity and prices. clearly, the canadian economy is not immune to global developments. we are watching for signs that adverse impacts of trade disputes are being felt beyond the export sectors that are directly affected. so far, all of the trade actions have been against firms in the goods sector, and the service sector has remained relatively resilient in most countries. we are looking to see the extent to which weakness from manufacturing may be spreading to services, employment, consumer spending or housing. in this regard, the most recent data have been mixed, so we continue to monitor the situation closely. 1 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches by the way, next week we will begin publishing a regular report about the bank ’ s quarterly canadian survey of consumer expectations. from now on, we will publish this alongside our current report on the business outlook survey. taken together with data from our senior loan officer survey, these give a more complete picture of the expectations of consumers, firms and lenders as an input into our interest rate decisions. labour and housing markets a second area we will be watching closely is the intersection between canada ’ s labour and housing markets. our labour market has shown a healthy trend over the past year. even though growth in new jobs seems to have slowed very recently, wage growth has continued to strengthen. we will be watching the data carefully to see how much of the recent moderation persists. in this respect, it is important to understand that labour market conditions vary quite a bit across different regions. meanwhile, population growth has increased recently, driven by immigration. this, too, has varied across regions. provinces such as british columbia, ontario and quebec, where job growth has been strong, continue to attract the bulk of new immigrants. this combination of job growth and rising population has supported a rebound in housing over the past year. should this housing rebound continue, we will be watching for signs of extrapolative expectations returning to certain major housing markets — in other words, froth. the fact is, the fundamental demand for housing appears to be outpacing our ability to build

new homes, which can put renewed upward pressure on prices. it can be very unhealthy when the situation becomes speculative because it can lead to a sudden downdraft in house prices later, with wider implications for the economy. stronger housing activity also means more household debt, of course, which continues to be canada ’ s biggest financial system vulnerability. the good news is that with the b - 20 guideline working to reduce the riskiest borrowing, we are confident that the stock of household debt is becoming less of a threat over time. assessing the economy ’ s capacity the third area is business investment. as you know, the trend in business investment has been running below expectations for the past three years. we ascribe this mainly to uncertainty around trade rules. however, we received a surprise with the national accounts data for the third quarter, which were published at the end of november. this report showed unexpectedly strong growth in business investment. what is more, previous data were revised upward quite significantly. staff have been digging into the data, aiming to get a better understanding of what is happening with investment. this is crucial to the outlook for the economy because investment is both important for growth and vital for building the economy ’ s productive capacity. and the whole concept of investment is evolving with the digitalization of the economy, making it much harder for statistics canada to measure. we will have a more complete narrative around this issue in a couple of weeks. but one element that i can mention today is that the revisions have made the federal government ’ s infrastructure program more visible in the data. what are financial markets telling us? the fourth major area for us is to understand what financial markets are telling us. you may recall that a year ago many commentators were talking about the inverted yield curve — shortterm interest rates were higher than long - term yields in many markets. some took this as a sign 2 / 3 bis central bankers'speeches of imminent recession in canada and elsewhere. at the time, we were forecasting economic growth for 2019 of close to 2 percent, and some saw this as far too optimistic. by last october, the bank was estimating 2019 growth would be about 1. 5 percent — a little less than what we had said a year ago, but not too far out of line. the final result will depend on the fourth quarter, but the point is, the dreaded inverted yield curve did not lead to a recession last year. there is certainly some historical correlation between inverted