Category The 2008-9 recession
Double dip risks
This post was written by Simon van Norden of HEC-Montréal. Brad DeLong and some others are publicly worrying about the risks of a double-dip recession in the US as federal fiscal stimulus winds down. Noting that Goldman Sachs … put the odds of a technical double-dip recession [in 2010Q2] at 25%-30%. Brad describes this as […]
The Canadian recovery is nearly complete. Now what?
According to this morning's Labour Force Survey release (the LFS is a mandatory survey that uses census data – are its days numbered, too?), 97% of the jobs that were lost to the recessions have been recovered. This, along with 78% of GDP (April data) and 64% of hours worked (3-month average) regained makes for […]
On the lessons to be learned from the elimination of the Canadian federal deficit in the 1990s
It would appear that there is a significant constituency in both the US and in Europe agitating for immediate efforts to reduce their respective governments' deficits, and some are pointing to the Canadian experience of the 1990s. If Canada could make the swift transition from decades of large and chronic deficits to being the poster […]
The beer and pizza theory of the Canadian recession revisited
Philip Cross at StatsCan summarises the recent recession: [T]he 2008-2009 recession in GDP was driven more by prices than volume in Canada, while in the US it was driven more by volume than by prices.
The rebound in federal government revenues
The Department of Finance publishes monthly numbers for how much money it has taken in, and how much it has spent. It chooses to run these numbers on the afternoon of the last Friday of the month these days. I'm pretty sure that when the feds were running surpluses, these numbers were released first thing […]
On the meme of the ‘surprisingly short and mild recession’
Two – count 'em – two opinion pieces today in which people pronounce them astounded at how the Not-So-Great-After-All Recession played out: Économie: le syndrome A(H1N1): Une analyse récente de la récession, dans le dernier numéro de l'Observateur économique de Statistique Canada, montre à quel point économistes, politiciens et médias se sont mis le doigt […]
The outlook for long-term unemployment
Does anyone remember the Employment Insurance psychodramas of last spring and summer? Threats were made, deadlines given, and lines were drawn in the sand. It all ended up in a temporary extension of benefits, and the issue went away. Although almost all of the noise was made about reducing the EI eligibility requirements, the real […]
How the hell can we tell (if fiscal policy worked)?
I feel guilty about not wading into the recent debate about whether fiscal policy helped the Canadian economy recover from the recession. It's one of the things I am supposed to know something about — basic macro. But there's a reason I couldn't be bothered to take sides and join in. The patient is ill. […]
The fiscal stimulus may well have been ineffective. But that doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a good idea.
A flurry of punditry has been provoked by a Fraser Institute thingy claiming that the federal government's fiscal stimulus program has had essentially no effect on the Canadian economy. (Question: why do they insist so much on the fact that they use numbers from Statistics Canada? Where do they usually get their national accounts data? […]
The Bank of Canada and the exchange rate: the facts have changed, and so has its views
You will remember that the dollar went from 0.86 USD to 0.97 between July and October of last year, and that the question of what to do about the appreciating CAD took up a lot of our attention in the fall. (Sadly, much of my attention was diverted to how badly the issue was covered […]
Worthwhile Canadian Initiative 
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