Category Finance
Fiscal Clout and Federation Redesign
The Parliamentary Budget Office has issued a very pleasing report on federal fiscal sustainability but the flip side is that the provinces and territories are now not fiscally sustainable because of their rising health costs and the federal fiscal gap created by the change in the Canada Health Transfer escalator. According to Andrew Coyne, the […]
Teaching notes on banks and money
[This is aimed at intermediate-level students. It's "big picture" stuff, and doesn't go into all the institutional details. And it's already too long.] Banks are financial intermediaries that create money. Banks are special because money is special. If we used cows as money, then dairy farms would be special, because dairy farms would create money. […]
Higher Education Financing Takes Two to Tango
Alex Usher of Higher Education Strategy Associates has spent the last week on his blog going through an analysis of the financing of Canadian universities. His final post on the subject today provides a convenient summary showing that while total dollars per student has grown substantially over time, the academic operating side of the university […]
Thoughts on teaching “The Time Value of Money”
Strangely, because I've always been a macro/money guy, and have been teaching economics for 30+ years, I'm currently teaching the intermediate-level "Monetary and Financial Institutions" (aka "Money and Banking") course for the first time ever. (20 years ago I did teach a crash course in Finance to Marxist-trained Cubans, which was fun, and forced me […]
The two James Tobins
Not many people know this, but there were actually two James Tobins. The first James Tobin (pdf) said that there cannot be an excess supply of money, because if anyone did have an excess supply of money he would immediately run to the bank to get rid of it. The second James Tobin said that […]
Banks are special because the medium of exchange is special
If we used cows as media of exchange (if we bought and sold everything else in exchange for cows), would you say that dairy farming is a special industry that is macroeconomically important? I would. Because if we used cows as media of exchange, then what happened on dairy farms would affect the supply of […]
University Debt II: A Longer-Term Perspective
My recent post on university debt presented data on total enrollment, total long-term debt and the debt to revenue ratio for 20 Ontario universities in 2012. I recently updated the numbers and was able to extend the data backwards to 2000 for many but not all of the same universities. For those of you who […]
University Debt: The Perils of Being Small
You may recall my recent post on Ontario university financing in which I focused on the university debt levels of Brock, Wilfrid Laurier and Guelph given that they were undergoing program reviews designed to address “sustainability”. Well, I have done a bit of an update by getting information on long-term debt, total revenues and enrolment […]
Is this a bank bailout by the CMHC? Quotas vs tariffs.
I learn from the CBC that the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation has imposed a quota of $350 million per month per individual bank (or other lender) on the amount of mortgage-backed securities it will guarantee. Presumably the CMHC did this because the Federal government wanted to put a cap of $85 billion on the […]
Mourning Detroit
Well, I have never been to Detroit and have only glimpsed it live from across the river in Windsor once. Yet, its bankruptcy has caught my interest because for the longest time in Thunder Bay we used to get our cable feed from Detroit (they then shifted away a few years ago to Minneapolis) and […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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