January’s Labour Force Survey release is (to me, anyway) an unexpected array of good news: December’s employment data were revised upwards from a loss of 18,700 jobs to one of 2,900 Employment increased by 46,400 in January The employment rate increased to 63.8%, yet another new record. Full-time employment went up; part-time employment went down […]
Stackelberg Follower makes a point about the appointment of Mark Carney as Governor of the Bank of Canada that has been studiously avoided by commentators until now: I remain unconvinced that investment bankers should be running the central bank. Now, I don’t have a pathological hatred that most of them will likely earn more than […]
One of the (many!) problems associated with living next to the US is the potential for confusing their problems with ours. The state of the housing market is a case in point. Here is a graph of US and Canadian housing starts: (I particularly like this graph because I was able to preserve the ‘rule […]
It’s an exciting time to be a macroeconomist in the US: sudden and large cuts in the federal funds rate, a fiscal stimulus plan, a current account deficit that may finally be unwinding: the whole nine yards. But almost none of that is spilling over here. The Bank of Canada did cut interest rates, yes, […]
January average daily maximum temperature in Moscow: -6.2C (20.8F) in Quebec City: -7.4C (18.7F) Attracting promising scholars is a challenge in itself. But most other departments don’t have to make their pitch while the candidate is shivering in a paper-thin trench coat and street shoes.
The Bank of Canada lowered its target for the overnight rate by 25 bps, to 4% today. This came as a surprise to pretty much no-one: core inflation is below the 2% target, and everyone can see the signs of a US slowdown. Either of those is a sufficient reason to lower interest rates. Although […]
I don’t really know, but that didn’t stop me from accepting an invitation from the local Radio-Canada station to do a radio interview on the subject (in French). You can listen to it here.
We all know that increasing commodity prices and the resulting appreciation of the CAD has resulted in a reduction in employment in the manufacturing sector: The shift of productive resources out of the manufacturing sector is of course the appropriate response to the relative price movements we’ve seen over the past five years, and the […]
The CAD appreciation hit a milestone in October, averaging above 1 USD for the first time in over thirty years. And the trade surplus went up. What’s going on? Here’s how the StatsCan release put it: In constant dollar terms, which isolates volume changes, volumes for imports rose 2.7% as prices declined 4.6%. Meanwhile, export […]
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 […]
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