Category International
Oil prices in currencies other than the USD revisited
Time up update my irregular series of graphs of oil price movements in currencies other than the USD: The story of the first couple of months is pretty straightforward: oil prices fell in January and came back up in February, and there wasn’t much in the way of significant exchange rate movements. By the end […]
On the Canada-US decoupling
There has been a certain amount of discussion about the ‘decoupling’ hypothesis: Economic train wreck in the U.S. would hit Canada, decoupled or not: After subprime, decoupling just might be the most overused word of the year in economics. A quick database search yields hundreds of newspaper stories about the decoupling phenomenon in the past […]
Recent oil price movements in currencies other than the USD, updated
Oil prices are now approaching USD100. Maybe it’s time to revisit the graph of oil prices in other currencies: In the last four weeks, the CAD has depreciated against the USD, and the yen has appreciated; the net result is that the CAD-yen exchange rate is pretty much where it was on Labour Day. If […]
Recent oil price movements in currencies other than the USD
Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen (among other things) A rise in the USD price of oil, and A fall in the value of the USD compared to other currencies To what extent do these two phenomena cancel out? Here’s a graph of oil prices in terms of the USD, the yen, the euro […]
Why doesn’t the US have a consumption tax?
The obvious answer would be ‘because it’s unpopular with voters’, but that really isn’t convincing: no-one likes to pay consumption taxes (the adjective most associated with Canada’s GST is ‘hated’). Come to think of it, no-one likes paying personal income taxes, either. But among OECD countries, it is only in the US where the architects […]
Canada’s exorbitant penalty
Canada’s current account surplus decreased by $C 5.3b in 2006Q4, thanks to a $C 4.5b deterioration of the income balance. The puzzle about the Canadian income balance is exactly the opposite of the one posed by the US balance. We’ve been running a healthy current account surplus for 6 years now, and the net international […]
The #1 reason to fear a hard landing in the US: There are no cushions
A US recession seems inevitable now. Unfortunately for those of us who would be negatively affected by this development, US policy-makers have, in their wisdom, stripped themselves of the means to attenuate its effects. Monetary policy: The Fed didn’t stop raising interest rates in August because it thought that inflation was under control; it did […]
How much damage can the Democrats do to free trade?
For some reason that I don’t fully understand, the last few days have seen any number of commentators opining about the anti-free-trade leanings of many Democrats. Jacob Weisberg’s column in today’s FT is representative: Free trade is the real election casualty: As a result of this year’s election, it now seems unlikely that the new […]
Collateral damage from the yuan peg
According to the Financial Times, US papers are looking to China for newsprint: The newsprint that will roll over the presses of the Orlando Sentinel some time next month may not look any different to the paper’s readers. But it will have endured a fairly tortuous journey – from a port in China, across the […]
Why are wages tracking productivity in Canada, but not the US?
A well-known curiousity of this business cycle is that US wages are stagnant, notwithstanding quite impressive improvements in worker productivity: But in Canada, real wages are tracking productivity fairly closely: The Canadian counter-example provides a useful check for possible explanations for the US ‘disconnect’. For example, consider the hypothesis that US real wages are being […]
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