Monthly Archives: April 2010
The outlook for long-term unemployment
Does anyone remember the Employment Insurance psychodramas of last spring and summer? Threats were made, deadlines given, and lines were drawn in the sand. It all ended up in a temporary extension of benefits, and the issue went away. Although almost all of the noise was made about reducing the EI eligibility requirements, the real […]
DIY Economics: Canadian Dollar Edition
I have made available the data set I discussed in The Correlation Between Oil Prices and the Canadian Dollar: 1995-2010. Excel file here: Canadian Dollar Data. Would love to see what you come up with!
The Correlation Between Oil Prices and the Canadian Dollar: 1995-2010
In an effort to improve the MERT (Moffatt Exchange Rate Toy), I constructed a data set of 3821 daily observations from January 3, 1995 to March 30, 2010 of five variables: FEDFUN: The Effective (Actual) Federal Funds Rate (U.S.) OVRNRT: The Effective (Actual) Overnight Money Market Financing Rate (CAN) INTGAP: OVRNRT – FEDFUN. The difference […]
Is intertemporal trade like international trade?
No answers in this post, only questions. If the past is another country, and so is the future: then is intertemporal trade (borrowing and lending), like international trade (exports and imports)? There are two stylised facts about the relation between international trade and GDP: international trade has been rising faster than GDP over the long […]
Comparing the HST with retail sales taxes
These notes on the HST and how it compares to the old retail sales tax were prepared by Frances Woolley. There are two fundamental differences between the new Harmonized Sales Tax (HST) and the old provincial sales tax or Retail Sales Tax (RST or PST). The first difference between the taxes is the tax base. […]
Because You Asked For It: Small Business Strategy and the Canadian Dollar
Reader westslope recently asked: BTW, does your company top brass pay attention to your MERT model and, perhaps, strategically plan and hedge accordingly? That’s an easy one for me to answer because I am charge of the finances for Nexreg (a small Canadian company that makes the majority of their sales in the U.S.). What […]
Lloyd George and Avatar
I haven't seen Avatar. That's good. It means I can take a clearer look at the underlying policy problem. The policy problem in Avatar is that some blue people own all of some valuable natural resource, and won't let anybody else have any. Lloyd George, as UK Chancellor of the Exchequer, addressed the same policy […]
How the hell can we tell (if fiscal policy worked)?
I feel guilty about not wading into the recent debate about whether fiscal policy helped the Canadian economy recover from the recession. It's one of the things I am supposed to know something about — basic macro. But there's a reason I couldn't be bothered to take sides and join in. The patient is ill. […]
The fiscal stimulus may well have been ineffective. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a good idea.
A flurry of punditry has been provoked by a Fraser Institute thingy claiming that the federal government's fiscal stimulus program has had essentially no effect on the Canadian economy. (Question: why do they insist so much on the fact that they use numbers from Statistics Canada? Where do they usually get their national accounts data? […]
In which I applaud the Nova Scotia budget
I don't follow what happens in Nova Scotia all that closely, but since the budget brought down by its new-ish NDP government reproduces the main features of the Quebec budget (of which I approved), it seems only fair to give credit where credit is due. To summarise: An increase in the HST by two percentage […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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