If only the news could be this good every week: Serial killer Robert Pickton gets 25 years. Disgraced tycoon Conrad Black gets 6.5 years. Former President of Peru, Alberto Fujimori, gets six years for abuse of power (with more charges pending). Karlheinz Shreiber tells of dirty dealings with the Mulroney government. The Mayor of Ottawa is charged with fraud. And […]
Read moreI’ve been on Facebook for almost a year now and have a love-hate relationship with it. For connecting me with old friends, feeling the daily pulse of people I know through status updates, and being a means of coordinating an event or party, thank you Facebook. But I am increasingly disturbed by the callous attitude taken by Facebook with regard […]
Read moreI was a friend of John Richards many years back, in the late 70s, when we shared a common passion for prairie left populism. He’s a bright guy, and a great writer. What bugs me is that he is still treated as a progressive by the media – based on his very brief history as an NDP Saskatchewan MLA in […]
Read moreNouriel Roubini – professor at NYU and noted blogger on the global economy – tends to the gloomy but is now seriously worried about where we are headed. With the Economist now out with a front page story on the likelihood of a serious US recession, his views seem to be entering the mainstream. http://www.rgemonitor.com/blog/roubini With the Recession […]
Read moreIn business news, shares of Hells Angels Inc and Rock Machine SA soared on the introduction of the Conservative’s new “get tough on drugs” legislation. Industry sources report they are pleased with the new initiative that will push up prices and profit margins. This is seen as a welcome about-face from the federal government compared to the flirtation with decriminalization […]
Read moreHeather Scoffield had an interesting little “how-to” guide in Saturday’s Globe and Mail on the macroeconomic effects of the improvement in Canada’s terms of trade (the result of soaring global prices for the resources which Canada increasingly exports). The terms of trade, for the blissfully uninitiated, is the ratio of a country’s export prices to its import prices. You can […]
Read moreIt’s not often that you can detect even a nuance of difference between Finance and the Bank on key economic issues, but do I detect a hint of greater alarm on the part of the former over the recent super-rapid appreciation of the Canadian Dollar? In yesterday’s Economic Statement (Chapter 1, p.19) “If the Canadian dollar were to remain close […]
Read moreThe Economic Statement announced a cut in the federal corporate income tax rate from 21% today (22.1% including the corporate surtax, which is being phased out), to 19.5% in 2008, to just 15% by 2012-13. The new 15% rate is well below the already announced reduction to 18.5% by 2011-12. The revenue cost in 2012-13 when the rate cut is […]
Read moreEconomists tend to be remarkably circumspect about racial discrimination in employment, and Statistics Canada is similarly loath to attribute differences in employment and earnings to racial status in other than the most nuanced way. Yet the evidence increasingly shows that racial discrimination is a matter of empirical fact in Canada, and not just a matter of perception on the part […]
Read moreThe business pages are covering this rather arcane issue more and more intensively. The Canadian market for so-called non bank asset backed commercial paper or ABCP has more or less frozen up, leaving some $40 Billion in stranded assets. Much of this seems to be held by large pension funds and other large institutions, with the Quebec Caisse exposed in […]
Read moreCanadian Policy Research Networks have put out what looks like an interesting study. Their blurb follows. The study is at http://www.cprn.org/doc.cfm?doc=1757&l=en Alberta is Canada’s hottest economy. Many Canadians are moving to Alberta drawn by its insatiable demand for skilled workers and professionals. Workers in Low-Income Households in Alberta, prepared for the Alberta Ministry of Employment, Immigration and Industry by […]
Read moreOn closer examination, there does seem to be statistical support for the view that the higher exchange rate is having more of an impact on retailer profits than on consumer prices. Data from the Financial Statistics for Enterprises survey show that operating profits in the trade sector (wholesale and retail trade combined) have jumped from just over $8 Billion in […]
Read moreErin’s recent post http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2007/09/12/government-size-canada-us/ prompted me to read Ferris and Winer’s interesting piece on the size of government in Canada and the US. The underlying data for the article have been usefully posted by the authors at http://http-server.carleton.ca/~winers/ (You’ll have to find the spread sheet posted at that site under author’s papers, and then look at the sheet for functional […]
Read moreThe Levy Institute, a Post-Keynesian think tank housed out of Bard College in NY state, has some new working papers up on its site that are worth a mention. The first two are from Randall Wray and the third from Dimitri Papadimitriou: The Continuing Legacy of John Maynard Keynes This working paper examines the legacy of Keynes’s General Theory of […]
Read moreAs background to the “flight from risk” which underpins the growing financial crisis in the US and Europe, see the latest annual report from the Bank for International Settlements published in June, especially the chapter on financial markets in the advanced industrial countries. The BIS is a kind of central bank for central banks. http://www.bis.org/publ/annualreport.htm While cautiously stated, it’s not […]
Read moreI’ve pasted in below a letter to Ministers Bernier and Flaherty re the just-announced review of the Foreign Investment Act and foreign take-overs of large Canadian corporations. Links to the two research studies cited in the letter showing that foreign ownership of large internationally-oriented corporations does matter in terms of impacts on the Canadian economy can be found at the […]
Read morehttp://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/ebrief_46.pdf
Read moreThe Canadian Economics Association annual conference is just ten days away. Writers are furiously writing up their papers for presentation (or like me, are procrastinating until the pressure builds); discussants are plotting clever things to say in response to those papers; and others are just figuring out where they will be sleeping in Halifax. As in the past, the Progressive […]
Read moreHere’s a communique (posted about 9 pm) from Peter Bakvis of the Global Unions office in Washington who has been closely observing this fiasco. One wonders if Canada is caving along with the Bushies or will stand as the last defenders of this nepotistic ultra neo con.., (And you read it here first — was it a coincidence that Paul […]
Read moreLAUREL ROTHMAN AND ARMINE YALNIZYAN Special to Globe and Mail Update May 8, 2007 at 12:37 AM EDT Canada‘s child and family poverty rate is down to 11.7 per cent in the latest Statistics Canada report, released last week. So why aren’t anti-poverty activists breaking out the bubbly? Because that rate is exactly what it was in 1989, when parliamentarians […]
Read more“Within the bank’s powerful executive board, support for Mr Wolfowitz has narrowed to just three countries – the US, Japan and Canada, although both the Japanese and Canadian governments have recently come under domestic pressure to withdraw their backing.” Â From today’s Guardian story on the imminent demise of the nepotistic neo con. http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,2074592,00.htmlÂ
Read moreHockey players are not the most sophisticated breed of human animal out there, but among the lot Shane Doan is one of the classier ones. So it is a bit much to hear Doan being called out on the legislative mat – in the House of Commons of all places – for being Team Canada’s captain, all over some passing […]
Read moreOne of the more arcane rituals of global economic governance is the annual meeting between G-8 labour leaders and the host of the annual G-8 summit (only Dubya refused to conform to the convention.) The statement to be presented to German Chancellor Merkel in a couple of weeks by CLC President Ken Georgetti and colleagues is, as as per past […]
Read moreStéphane Dion, who is not progressive, has allied with Elizabeth May, who is not progressive, ostensibly to prevent progressive vote-splitting. As Andrew Coyne notes in tomorrow’s National Post column, this maneuver is clearly directed against the federal NDP, which is progressive. It is worth recalling the 2006 election results in Central Nova, the riding where Dion has pledged to prevent […]
Read morehttp://www.ndp.ca/xfer/pdf/2007-03-09-flahertyprebudget_e.pdf A good letter outlining what the federal NDP would like to see in the upcoming federal Budget.
Read morehttp://www.liberal.ca/news_e.aspx?type=speech&id=12324 No big surprises in today’s big speech to a business audience – the usual mainstream Finance/OECD stuff on enhancing competitiveness by building a knowledge based economy. Surprisingly little in the way of an attempt to link industrial and environmental policy, for all of that green rhetoric during the leadership campaign. Ditto re any linkage between social justice and economic […]
Read morehttp://www.statcan.ca/Daily/English/070223/d070223a.htm Philip Cross of Statscan has writen an interesting analysis of our very weak labour productivity performance in 2006. Output per hour growth has been very slow – a result of weak output growth combined with fairly strong job growth. The key factor highlighted here is declining productivity in the mining sector as production shifts to less accessible resources, and […]
Read morehttp://papers.nber.org/papers/W12910 An instructive – and admittedly interesting – example of the proclivity of economists to reduce almost everything to rationalist explanations. Attack Assignments in Terror Organizations and The Productivity of Suicide Bombers Efraim Benmelech, Claude Berrebi NBER Working Paper No. 12910 Issued in February 2007 NBER Program(s):Â Â Â LS Â Â Â POL This paper studies the relation between human capital of suicide bombers […]
Read moreArun Dubois’ posts on copyright and intellectual property have me digging back a decade to my days as a bureaucrat at Industry Canada in the Information and Communications Technology branch. I remember reading this essay by John Perry Barlow, published in Wired back in 1996 or so, and finding it really compelling. Reading it again today, some of Barlow’s terminology […]
Read moreThe minimum wage debate is heating up once again, with the NDP and labour strongly pushing for a minimum wage of at least $10 per hour in Ontario and at the federal level (as recently recommended by the Arthurs Report.) Anti poverty groups and the Toronto Star now strongly endorse a decent minimum wage as part of an anti poverty […]
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