Monthly Archives: February 2010
What is going on with Canadian holdings of US Treasuries?
Regular commenter Kosta points us to this release of major foreign holders of US Treasuries, noting that Canadian holdings increased by a factor of six between December 2008 and December 2009 (from USD 7.8b to USD 48.3). That may be from a low base, but even if you scale the numbers by GDP – as […]
The Nigel Tufnel school of tax analysis
This is from a post awhile ago: [P]ersuading Canadian progressives of [the] merits [of the GST] is a never-ending variation on the theme of "but these go to eleven:" Progressive Person: How do we raise the tax revenues we need for the social programs we want to implement without tanking the economy?Economist: Consumption taxes. Theory […]
Fallacies of composition and decomposition: the supply of money and reserves
Does the supply of reserves matter? It certainly matters in the simple textbook ECON 1000 model of the money multiplier. But is that model fatally flawed, especially in the context of zero required reserves, and where central banks target an interest rate, so the quantity of reserves is demand-determined? Some people do argue that the […]
Of horses and men
As a teenager I read Kurt Vonnegut's novel Player Piano. It's stuck in my economist's mind ever since. It describes life in the near-future when technology and machines have destroyed the demand for nearly all human labour, except for the labour of a small, highly-educated minority. The vast majority of the population would be unemployed, […]
“Time to stop fretting over the Canadian dollar”
That's the title of a column I wrote for Canadian Business. Go read it – there'll be doughnuts. http://media.entertonement.com/embed/OpenEntPlayer.swf Mmm Donuts sound bite Homer Simpson sound bites
In which the Conference Board of Canada confuses good news with bad
The Conference Board has just released a report entitled "CanCompete: Re-Energizing Canada’s International Trade—Strategies for Post-Recession Success," available here. In its summary of recent trade patterns for Canada, it notes that Canadian exports grew because these goods increased in value rather than because Canada sold more goods and services abroad. This is a true and […]
Long-term unemployment in Canada and the US
Last September, I wrote this, in a post where I made graphs comparing the number of long-term unemployed workers in Canada and the US: The more I look at the US, the more I see unpleasant parallels to Canada's experience of the 1990's – what Pierre Fortin called The Great Canadian Slump. Even after we […]
On the history of the federal government’s structural balance
In the report it released last month, the Parliamentary Budget Office provided estimates and projections for the federal government's structural balance – that is, with the effects of the business cycle stripped out. This is always a tricky business, but their historical numbers resemble those produced by the Department of Finance (Figure 4-1), and the […]
The gendered recession
Yesterday's LFS numbers were better than a kick in the head with a frozen boot: just under one-third of the losses inflicted by the recession on the labour market have been recovered. But there's something else that happened in the January release. Many have already noted that employment losses among men were more severe than […]
Demographic change isn’t a long-term problem any more
It's now a short-term problem. I spent the morning doing interviews on CBC radio morning shows in Corner Brook, Victoria and nine places in between. (For those of you who caught it, yes, I really do speak that quickly. I try to slow down when I'm on the air, but sometimes I forget.) One of […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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