Category Media
A tale of two Depressions
The Ottawa Citizen's Dan Gardner has a mission, one that is almost Quixotic in nature: solitary, noble, and doomed to failure. He has taken it upon himself to chastise lazy pundits who seek to augment their columns with injections of Ersatz GravitasTM (It's deep! It's cheap!) by comparing the present-day Canadian economy with the Great […]
Idiotic economics in the Globe and Mail. Again.
I can understand that the Globe feels obliged to provide points of view from varying points on the political spectrum. Sadly, it carries out this mandate by publishing dumb commentary from varying points on the political spectrum. On the right, it offers Neil Reynolds (typical car wreck here). And on the left, it offers stuff […]
What do do with the $1.95/vote subsidy: Give it to the Parliamentary Budget Office
We all know that the Harper government's proposal to kill the the $1.95/vote subsidy for the federal political parties blew up in its face. But would it have been good policy? Andrew Coyne thinks so, and it's hard to see just what public policy goal is being served by giving public money to political parties. […]
On the economics of the MSM print media
Paul Wells, Andrew Potter and Dan Gardner have posted recently on the plight of the economic model of MSM journalism. What will happen to popular discourse if people stop buying newspapers and magazines because pretty much everything that's in them is available for free on the internet? Well, let's consider what's at stake. From page […]
The Bank of Canada’s Financial System Review
The Bank of Canada published its December 2008 Financial System Review yesterday. I spent a few hours reading it through (something I had never bothered to do in the past). Some observations:
The Globe and Mail succumbs to irrational panic
This is getting to be a problem. A few weeks ago, the Globe ran this story: Job cuts loom at Canadian firms: poll: More than one-fifth of Canadian employers plan to reduce their headcount in the coming year as the financial crisis forces companies to cut costs, a compensation planning survey showed Monday. Mercer's updated […]
When irrational panic becomes the new normal
Jack Mintz followed up on his op-ed column with a question-and-answer session on the Globe and Mail's website. The points he made would be familiar to readers of this blog – Canada is not the United States, we are not in recession (although the odds that we will be soon are much better than even), […]
That can’t be right…
Maclean's interviews TD Bank's Don Drummond to get some perspective on recent developments. The first question is on the exchange rate, and the response is, well, here it is: [O]n average, Canadian business is about 85 per cent as productive as U.S. business, so if nothing else happened, we should see a dollar averaging about […]
Election markets are beyond silly
I'm going to indulge in a heaping helping of I Told You So: Trader drove up price of McCain 'stock' in online market: An internal investigation by the popular online market Intrade has revealed that an investor’s purchases prompted “unusual” price swings that boosted the prediction that Sen. John McCain will become president. Over the […]
“If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you”… you’ll lose the election
Consider two recent media feeding frenzies: Stéphane Dion admits that there might be circumstances in which an eventual Liberal government might run a deficit. Stephen Harper notes that "Canada is not the United States": there is no crisis of solvency in the Canadian financial system, and there's no evidence that one will occur anytime soon. […]
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