Author Archives: wciecon
The Toronto Star gets a mulligan
When I read this inane editorial, I was determined to get medieval on the TorStar editorial board’s behind. But then I got caught up in the National Post’s ‘nopigou‘ schtick, and I lost heart. Even though they’re kinda dim, the Toronto Star does mean well.
Nonsensical nonpigovianism
In which the National Post’s Terence Corcoran crawls out on a limb and starts hacking it off behind him: We open with his ‘Join the nopigou club‘ column, in reaction to Greg Mankiw’s campaign for higher gasoline taxes in the US. This column is greeted with a rather laconic reply from Mankiw, and a certain […]
Economists as politicians
André Boisclair made his début as the leader of the opposition Parti Québécois in the Quebec legislature yesterday, and it occurred to me that both opposition parties in Quebec now have leaders with at least some sort of training in economics: Mario Dumont of the ADQ has a BA from Concordia, and André Boisclair was […]
The Bank of Canada leaves the overnight rate at 4.25%
Even though the growth in demand has slowed somewhat – largely due to a slowdown in exports to the US – the Bank isn’t in any particular hurry to start lowering interest rates just yet. According to their projection, demand will still be strong enough to be putting upward pressure on inflation for at least […]
Canada’s trade surplus: Running on fumes
The trade surplus increased in August: Canadian companies exported merchandise worth $38.7 billion in August, up 0.3% from July, with strong gains in industrial goods and materials and automotive products. On the other hand, imports declined 0.6% to $34.5 billion, following two consecutive monthly increases. The resulting merchandise trade surplus amounted to $4.2 billion, compared […]
The Toronto Star surpasses itself
The Star has a reputation for looking for a local angle in any story, and then making it the lede: some wag once predicted that it’s final edition would start with "End of world snarls Metro traffic." So I’m going to assume that today’s headline is an inside joke. An airplane hits a building in […]
The Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey: It’s quiet. It’s *too* quiet.
From the autumn survey (pdf): "The balance of opinion on future sales growth has fallen close to zero, indicating that sales are expected to increase at about the same pace as in the past 12 months. Many firms in Western Canada, including those in the services sector, are facing capacity constraints and therefore do not […]
Welfare states can be competitive
Jim Stanford sets aside our shared scepticism about the WEF competitiveness rankings to make two points in his column in today’s Globe and Mail: Get real about Canadian competitiveness: Nine of the 15 countries ahead of us on the WEF list collect higher taxes than Canada. Indeed, the Scandinavian welfare states cleaned up this year: […]
Real wages and the terms of trade: Productivity growth is little help if you’re making stuff no-one wants to buy
To resume from where we left off last time, if you deflate nominal US nonfarm business sector compensation by the NFB deflator, you get a real compensation series that tracks productivity pretty well. But if you deflate it by the CPI, real buying power has lagged well behind productivity since the mid-70’s: Although the standard […]
A puzzling proxy from The Economist
From The Economist: [R]eal interest rates should be roughly the same as the trend rate of GDP growth (a proxy for the return on capital). This isn’t the first time I’ve seen this statement used there, and I once even wrote a letter asking about it. I’ve tried playing around with several expressions that describe […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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