Category Finance
Blue sky money two – money and not banking
Banking is a subset of finance. Money and finance go together. Money and banking go even more together. But they don't have to go together. Maybe they didn't ought to go together. Finance is unstable. Banking is even more unstable than the rest of finance. A bank makes promises it knows it might not be […]
Why has (private) debt increased?
I'm not talking about government debt. I'm talking about the debt of households and firms. And I'm talking long run, not just the last few years. Over the last several decades, the ratio of debt to GDP has increased a lot. Not just in Canada, but in most rich countries, as far as I know. […]
Could the failed German bond sale be good news for the Euro?
File this one under "desperately looking for a silver lining in the unfolding disaster". Suppose, just suppose, that all 17 Eurozone countries were identical. Suppose they were all at the Eurozone average. Suppose they all faced the same default risk and moderately high interest rates on their government bonds. What would the European Central Bank […]
Tightening money and widening Eurozone spreads
How do we know the Eurozone crisis has been getting worse over the last few days? The indicator that I watch most closely, and I think others watch most closely, is the yield spread between German government bonds and the bonds of other Eurozone governments. If those spreads widen, it means the crisis is getting […]
Politics and Taxes
I wanted to weigh in on Stephen Gordon’s post on the Ontario HST reduction but found my entry in the comment box growing so here is a post instead. Why are the Conservatives and more to the point the NDP supporting what seems like a redistribution to higher incomes? Well, I think it comes down […]
General Gluts, Secular Stagnation and the World Economy
The head of the International Monetary Fund warned today on her visit to Beijing that the global economy faces the risk of a "lost decade" with little or no growth and that without action, the world faces worsening financial instability and a possible collapse of demand. This news item also coincided with my morning lecture […]
Dealing with the Debt Crisis: A Greek Maneuver?
It has been a dizzying week around the world as fears of Greek debt default lead to yet another roller-coaster ride on world stock markets after Papandreou called for a domestic referendum on the European led rescue plan.
Eurozone to issue yuan bonds???
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative is not normally a blog for very short posts. We try to be a bit more analytical. But there's really not much one can say about this idea reported in the Telegraph, other than: this is really stupid. The whole Eurozone problem is that each Eurozone country was issuing bonds in what […]
Revisiting the Sustainability of Post-Secondary Education
I decided to try and dig a little deeper on the issue of the sustainability of post-secondary education spending in Canada by looking at the numbers in real per capita terms and by province. As I mentioned in my earlier post, while fiscal sustainability is a term generally used in the health care policy debate, […]
Canada’s Provincial Debt Divide
The release of the 2011 Federal Fiscal Reference Tables is a good opportunity for me to refresh myself with an assortment of public finance statistics. What caught my attention this year was the evolution of the east-west divide in provincial public debt.
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