Category International
Exchange Rates and Gasoline Prices?
Well the price of gasoline just spiked upwards across Canada and the usual media analysis has begun. Five key reasons were summarized as follows by Shawn McCarthy in the Globe and Mail: 1) Approach of the summer driving season leading to a switch to summer gas formulations which leads to a reduction in supply. 2) […]
What is a “managed exchange rate”?
It's a relative thing. I think it can only be defined relative to some specified alternative, like inflation targeting. It doesn't mean anything otherwise. There are n different things a central bank could target, where n is an extremely large number. (Strictly, n is infinite, since any combination of two members of n is also […]
Alpha banks, beta banks, fixed exchange rates, market shares, and the money multiplier
Forget money and banking for a minute. Let's think about international macroeconomics. Just suppose the US Fed, for reasons unknown, pegged the exchange rate of the US dollar to the Canadian dollar. The Fed makes a promise to ensure the US dollar will always be directly or indirectly convertible into Canadian dollars at par. The […]
US Budget 2015: Some Quick Thoughts
The Budget of the U.S. Government for the 2015 fiscal year was presented at the White House today and unlike Canada, we are not looking at a balanced budget by 2015. Indeed, the forecast is for a small decline in the deficit but the rest of the decade looks like deficits all the way down. […]
Russia or China – Who Should the US Worry More About?
Developments in Crimea have shifted international attention to Russia in a manner we have not seen since the end of the Cold War. Recent years have seen an American preoccupation with the rise of China rather than Russia as a world economic and military power but the question remains – which one might be the […]
Taxation and Growth: A North American Cross-Border Comparison
My last comparison of U.S. states and Canadian provinces with respect to their federal transfer revenue shares got me thinking about the other revenue sources and whether any relationship could be found between economic growth and revenue composition. Income taxation is supposed to have incentive and distortion effects on saving, risk taking and labor supply […]
Fiscal Federalism: A Cross-Border Comparison
As a federal country, one of Canada’s hallmarks is a well-developed system of intergovernmental transfers. Indeed, we often remark that Canadian provinces are dependent on federal transfers for large chunks of their spending and there is some debate over whether Canada’s provinces should engage in more own-source revenue effort rather than plead for more transfers. […]
International Employment Update: U.S. Resilience and Australian Exceptionalism
I thought it was time for an updated look at employment creation in the advanced economies given that we are now at just over five years since the 2008-09 Great Recession that walloped world economies. I’ve taken the IMF World Economic Outlook Database employment numbers for the period 2007 to 2013 to get employment levels […]
Economic Inequality, Saving and Economic Growth
“It is generally recognized that more saving takes place in communities in which the distribution of wealth is uneven than in those in which it approaches more closely to modern conceptions of what is just.” T.S. Ashton (1948) The Industrial Revolution 1760-1830, p. 7. I came across this quote while reading Ashton’s account of the […]
“Is the falling exchange rate good news or bad news?”
I was on CBC radio yesterday morning for about 5 minutes, talking about the exchange rate. From this experience, and from previous similar experiences, this is what reporters want to ask: "Who gains, and who loses, from the fall in the exchange rate? For Canada as a whole, is the fall in the exchange rate […]
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