Monthly Archives: November 2008
Drawing the wrong lessons from policy errors
I've been spending much of the day thinking about the Coyne Affair. You may well ask what the Coyne Affair is; it seems to be one of the few things for which there is no convenient Wikipedia entry to which I can direct you. The Coyne Affair refers to James Coyne, who was Governor of […]
How do we stop it from happening again?
Nick Rowe passes this along: We failed. By “we” I mean economists. Sure, there’s a lot of blame to go round; a lot of people made bad decisions. But we didn’t know how to design a financial system which is robust enough to cope with people making bad decisions. If some people paid too much […]
If only Wilfrid Laurier had won the 1911 election
Much discussion in the past few days and weeks about the wisdom of throwing public money at the Detroit Three (when did they stop being the Big Three?). I'm in the camp of those who don't like the idea, but I'm not going to be a zealot about it just now. Given where we are […]
Are Canadian houses over-priced? A revised estimate
Stackelberg Follower notes that housing prices in Canada continue to not crash. Should we expect them to? Nick Rowe revisits some recent evidence and passes this along: [I thank Tsur Somerville for emailed comments on a previous draft of this Note] An August 2008 paper by Tsur Somerville and Kitson Swann of the Sauder School […]
The curious economics of university faculty unions
I was on strike a couple of weeks ago, for the span of three days. Not just me, of course; the faculty at l'Université Laval is unionised. The whole notion of faculty unions seems a bit odd to me, and it's not just the incongruous image of seeing tenured professors whose salaries put them in […]
The turning point is now about four months late
Once again, two very separate pieces of economic news in yesterday's employment releases for October: US employment declined by 2.5% at annual rates from September (which was not a good month for US employment), and Canadian employment rose by 0.7% at annual rates from September (which saw record employment gains). We're moving into uncharted territory […]
That can’t be right…
Maclean's interviews TD Bank's Don Drummond to get some perspective on recent developments. The first question is on the exchange rate, and the response is, well, here it is: [O]n average, Canadian business is about 85 per cent as productive as U.S. business, so if nothing else happened, we should see a dollar averaging about […]
“Canada is not the United States” – Auto sales edition
Yet another horrible month for auto sales in the US: US auto sales 'unsustainably weak': General Motors Corp.'s October U.S. sales plunged 45 per cent, and Ford Motor Co.'s and Chrysler LLC's weren't far behind, as low consumer confidence and tight credit combined to bring the industry's sales to an “unsustainably weak level” that is […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
Recent Comments