Monthly Archives: March 2010
Mike Moffatt joins Worthwhile Canadian Initiative
For several years now, Mike Moffatt has been running the economics page at About.com, as well as writing a blog to which I've linked repeatedly. He has decided to move on to other projects, but he'd like to keep blogging. Nick and I would also like him to keep blogging, so we are very pleased […]
The Bank of Canada and the Fed are facing different problems, and will make different choices
David Rosenberg has been saying ([1], [2]) that the Bank shouldn't and/or won't start increasing interest rates until the Fed does, but I don't understand the reasoning behind this conclusion. Usually, the US and Canadian economies follow similar paths and since their monetary authorities have broadly similar goals, this has resulted in broadly similar decisions. […]
The corporate tax on workers and consumers
One of the NDP's lines on the budget – the very first words spoken by Jack Layton in his reaction during the CBC coverage – is to denounce the continuation of the corporate tax rate reductions that began under Jean Chrétien's government in 2000. (The basic rate was 28% in 2000, is at 18% now […]
Where did the unemployed manufacturing workers go?
I noted a couple of months ago that employment losses in the recession were generally concentrated in the goods-producing sector: some 350,000 jobs were lost there, and there's been little in the way of recovery. On the other hand, job losses in the services sector (about 3 times as large) were on the order of […]
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; does the Zero Lower Bound matter?
I want to compare the economies of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand over the last couple of years. I know I will get things wrong, and leave important things out. That's what comments are for. Especially comments from Australia and New Zealand. Why these three countries? Apart from any historical, cultural, and political similarities, all […]
A buying opportunity for snowbirds?
Casey Mulligan notes that "US houses during the boom did not look so expensive from a European perspective", although he's not sure to what extent it matters. I suspect that it matters a lot to many Canadians. Here's a graph of the Case-Shiller Phoenix house price index in USD and in CAD, along with the […]
Ex post and ex ante comparisons of the Canadian and US employment recessions
Today's LFS release was another piece of welcome news: some 38% of the losses in employment and in hours worked have been recovered. And I think it's time for those who predicted that Canada was not going to implode to take a bow.
What if price-level targeting were already in place?
A popular research topic at the Bank of Canada over the past few years has been price-level targeting: committing to a path for the level of core CPI, not just to its rate of inflation. The idea here is that standard inflation targeting forgets and forgives past deviations from target. But under price level targeting, […]
Economic nationalism is the last refuge of incompetent managers
At one point during the coverage of last Thursday's budget, Allan Gregg suggested that some of the measures – liberalizing the telecoms market, tariff cuts – would bring economic nationalism back to the public agenda (my immediate reaction). And today, Jeffrey Simpson is talking about the perils of the 'branch plant economy'.
When 5.0% GDP growth is better news than 5.9% GDP growth
In 2009Q4, US GDP grew by 5.9% at annual rates; the number was 5.0% in Canada. But our news was much better. Here is a graph of the contributions to GDP growth by expenditure category: US GDP growth would have been only 2.0% without the contribution of the inventory terms (which was itself a deceleration […]
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