Author Archives: wciecon
Red/green money, Bank of Canada settlement balances, and TARGET2
This post is about something I don't understand. Let's start out simple. There are two parallel imaginary worlds: the green world and the red world. In the green world people use positively-valued green money as the medium of exchange. If I buy something I give the seller my green money in exchange. Green money flows […]
Help! The senior guy in my field acts like a total jerk sometimes. What should I do?
I wrote myself a letter, and answered it: Dear WCI, The senior guy in my field acts like a total jerk sometimes. He's working in an area I care deeply about – gender and taxation. But he trivializes and sensationalizes critically important issues. For example, I just heard him give a talk about the optimal tax treatment of […]
Why the USA Has A Trump and We Don’t (Yet…)
In the wake of the US presidential election and Donald Trump’s ascension to the mantle of “leader of the free world”, one is left pondering the factors that differentiate Canada from the United States. When I was a young boy and visited relatives in Italy, much to my confusion we were invariably referred to as, […]
My Cunning Plan to reform New Keynesian Macro
Brad DeLong calls it my "self-imposed Sisyphean task". He's probably right. But it seems worth a try, as long as there's a small chance he's wrong. I have a Cunning Plan. Like it or not (and there is much to like as well as dislike), New Keynesian macro has become the […]
Assignment of targets to instruments, stability, and Functional Finance
J.W. Mason and Arjun Jayadev have a paper making a new (to me) point about the assignment of targets to instruments. First I'm going to present an (over-?) simplified version of their model, to explain the gist of it. [I think I've got the gist of it, but I'm not 100% sure, and I know […]
A Grave Problem
Ontario has no eerie, overgrown church graveyards. There are no dangerously angled tombstones, no grave markers obscured by rambling vines, nor ancient trees with branches sweeping the ground. In Ontario, cemetery operators are required to maintain graveyards properly. There must be an accessible entrance. Grave markers must be stabilized. Section 29 of the Funeral, Burial and Cremation […]
Synchronisation and the Gross Money Supply
You decide to make a new monetary system from scratch. You give everyone a chequing account on your computer, with an initial balance of 0 units. If Andy buys bananas from Betty and pays her 100 units, Betty now has a positive balance and Andy now has a negative balance. The Net money supply remains […]
Why is it so hard to know the relationship between immigration and economic performance?
Here is the number of new permanent residents to Canada, as a percentage of the existing population, over time: "New permanent residents" is not a perfect measure of immigration – it excludes temporary foreign workers, who have become much more important in recent years, and also ignores emigration, that is, the non-trivial number of newcomers […]
The carbon costs of immigration
Canada is, as far as countries go, relatively cold and sparsely populated. Our houses are large by global standards, and we drive a fair amount. We are rich enough to consume a lot of stuff. These factors, together with the oil sands, mean that we have one of the world's highest levels of CO2 emissions on […]
A Supreme Folly
Last August, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that, in future, only candidates who are "functionally bilingual" in French and English will be recommended for positions on the Supreme Court of Canada. With the information released subsequent to the nomination of Malcolm Rowe to the Court, we now have some sense of what this means. At a minimum, […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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