A year ago, as part of his 2009 crisis budget, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty created a Task Force on Financial Literacy. The goal was to equip Canadians with more knowledge to traverse the minefields of high finance. This week, just in time for Flaherty’s next budget, the Task Force released its initial “consultation” report.            On one level, this […]
Read moreGreece is being played in the media as a morality play in which a profligate government is brought to account by the bond market and forced to submit to stern – but justified – austerity measures. While Greek economic governance before the socialists recently returned to power was not without huge flaws, this account misses out on some key fronts. […]
Read moreFollowing are my speaking notes for a presentation I was asked to make to labour ministers last week. I found myself much much more gloomy than my fellow panelists who think that we shall soon be experiencing labour and skills shortages. I hope they are right – but fear that this theme is being developed to deflect the need for […]
Read moreHere is the link to a very good paper by Pierre Habbard of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD. http://www.tuac.org/en/public/e-docs/00/00/06/7C/document_doc.phtml The IMF appears to be consulting quite widely and with some sympathy to proponents of an FTT , so we may yet get a positive report to the G20, opening up a realistic possibility of agreement if Obama […]
Read moreLast week, I argued that discussions about reversing tax cuts should not be limited to the GST. To advance this debate, I have crunched some numbers on corporate taxes using federal budget documents and tax expenditure reports. Budget 2009 (see Table A2.2 on page 255) indicates that federal corporate tax cuts since 2006 will reduce annual revenue by $14.9 billion […]
Read moreIt is not every day that two Relentlessly Progressive Economists appear on the same TV panel. But Andrew and I did exactly that on last Wednesday’s episode of The Agenda with Steve Paikin. We debated international trade with a World Bank economist, Cato Institute analyst and Canadian trade lawyer.
Read moreStatsitics Canada has released some interesting new obscure research on what constitutes a “purchasing power parity” exchange rate for Canada. It was summarized in an article in the December Canadian Economic Observer, and is explained more fully in an on-line technical paper by John Baldwin and Ryan Macdonald. First off, let me remind everyone that the international empirical evidence is […]
Read moreI guess I must be a Rodney Dangerfield economist. Because I just don’t get no respect — at least not in some quarters. It all started with an interesting CBC on-line column from the erstwhile Don Newman: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/01/07/f-vp-newman.html He was taking Stephen Harper to task for proroguing Parliament. Among other aguments, he noted that Canada’s economy had serious issues that […]
Read moreSome puzzling comments in today’s Globe story casting cold water on the notion that there is a housing bubble. The story makes the classic anti bubble argument that national averages conceal a lot of local variation, reflecting local conditions. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/the-home-price-puzzle/article1475073/ “Toronto-Dominion Bank economist Pascal Gauthier says the diverse nature of Canada’s real estate market means a U.S.-style bubble is not […]
Read moreAs the budget yak-fest approaches, the focus is on how we’re going to balance the books. People pointing out we have bigger fish to fry – like making a dent in the nation’s $125 billion infrastructure deficit, addressing growing poverty, or preparing for a massive wave of retirements – are viewed as off-topic. But simply balancing the books is what’s […]
Read moreThe number of Canadians receiving Employment Insurance (EI) benefits plummeted in December. The drop of 40,100 was the largest monthly decrease in years. One would anticipate some decline in the number of EI recipients as the job market begins to recover. But the magnitude of December’s decline suggests that, in addition to those former recipients who found work, many more simply […]
Read moreThe Conference Board of Canada published a report late last month, Dispelling the Myths, which purports to show that public-private partnerships (P3s) have delivered major efficiency gains for the public sector, a high degree of cost certainty, and greater transparency than conventional procurement. While the report maintains it provides an impartial assessment of the benefits and drawbacks of using P3s, it is […]
Read moreWages had seemed to be one of the relative bright spots during the economic crisis. Despite the carnage in Canada’s job market, average hourly earnings held up fairly well. However, comparing today’s Consumer Price Index release for January with the Labour Force Survey for that month reveals that inflation exceeded fractional wage gains over the past year. Specifically, the annual […]
Read morePerhaps by now you have seen the TV commercials for Bell touting its much faster 3G network for web phones. Rogers is suing on the basis that Bell is basically making this up. What’s interesting about it, though, is that Bell, Telus and others entering the web phone (or should we just say iPhone) business are not seeking to compete […]
Read moreIt is striking that, even while moved to concern and some action, the Bank of Canada and the Minister of Finance are still desperately afraid to admit that Canada is experiencing a housing bubble. One can go on and on about how difficult it is to spot a bubble. But, as Dean Baker has often argued with reference to the […]
Read moreI was out of town and away from the blogosphere during the recent controversy about TD Bank CEO Ed Clark’s “raise my taxes†comment. As Terry Corcoran pointed out, CEOs are not actually proposing higher taxes on executive incomes or corporate profits. They are instead proposing to hike the GST, a tax that exempts all income in excess of consumption and […]
Read moreThis morning federal finance minister Flaherty announced a number of measures ostensibly aimed at reining in speculation in the housing market. His announcement was typically well-timed to coincide with the Vanier Institute’s annual report on the state of Canadian family finances, which reports record high levels of household debt, growing inequality and housing prices increasingly out of whack with incomes. But […]
Read moreI contribute occasionally to a web based publication, The Mark. Today they are running my piece on the continuing crisis in the job market, and the need for governments to respond. http://themarknews.com/articles/948-still-in-recession The first few paras follow: “While the situation is not quite as daunting as in the U.S., Canada’s job market is still mired in deep recession. Chances are […]
Read moreWho would have thunk it. Seems like there is a pretty radical rethink of monetary policy verities going on at the IMF of all places. The exchange rate rethink seems especially relevant to Canadian monetary policy and they will be aghast at the Bank of Canada on the case for higher inflation targets. From today’s FT http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f9f4067e-1758-11df-87f6-00144feab49a.html IMF floats plan […]
Read moreVale, the company against which my union has been on strike since July of last year, released its fourth-quarter earnings this evening. This release deflates the company’s rationale for demanding labour concessions and confirms that the strike is hurting its bottom line. Vale wants to eliminate defined-benefit pensions for new employees and drastically reduce the bonus paid to workers when […]
Read moreI was going to comment on Jim’s post, but ended up writing enough to warrant a new post. Jim correctly argues that Buy American provisions are tiny in the grand scheme of Canada-US trade. Similarly, whatever potential procurement preferences Canada bargained away would also have been tiny by this standard. The overall economic effect of last week’s deal will be […]
Read moreI’ve found the politics of the Buy American controversy very odd. President Obama, to help sell his massive stimulus package to the American public, added measures to maximize domestic content in stimulus-funded projects. From his perspective, that was sensible both economically (reduces the import leakage from the stimulus) and politically. If anything, it should have reinforced our nascent efforts in […]
Read moreAn interesting column, arguing that the very limited rise in unemployment in the Great Recession in Australia owes a lot to a well-constructed stimulus program of the Labour government, based on higher transfers to lower income households plus short and medium term infrastructure investment. http://column.global-labour-university.org/2009/11/riding-your-luck-and-adopting-right.html
Read moreLast Monday, I testified twice to the Ontario legislature’s finance committee: as an “expert witness” and then on behalf of the United Steelworkers. I emphasized the provincial deficit’s manageability, the folly of trying to reduce it through cutbacks or privatization, the importance of maintaining tax rates to bolster future revenues, and the advantage of targeted measures to create jobs rather […]
Read moreBack in December, during the Copenhagen negotiations, a group of environmentalists provided BC Premier Gordon Campbell with an award for climate leadership. Based primarily on the creation of a BC carbon tax two years ago, the Premier has gotten a lot of brownie points from the greens – in spite of the fact that there are some glaring contradictions between […]
Read moreIn January, Canada gained 43,000 jobs, almost all of them part-time. Any employment increase is certainly good news and some part-time positions might eventually become full-time positions. The obvious limitation of part-time jobs is that they provide fewer hours of paid work and hence less income. Statistics Canada’s R-8 unemployment rate, which includes discouraged workers and a portion of those […]
Read moreOntario’s pre-budget consultations include a session for which each party caucus selects an “expert witness.†This year, the Liberals invited Warren Jestin from Scotiabank, the Conservatives invited Catherine Swift from the Canadian Federation of Independent Business (CFIB) and the NDP invited me. In general, my role was not to engage with the other witnesses. The Conservatives asked me about CFIB’s […]
Read moreI highly recommend a very convincing argument for the FTT by Stephan Schulmeister of the Austrian Institute for Economic Research. His paper  effectively counters the “rational markets” view that high volumes of speculative trading move stock, currency and commodity prices towards equilibrium values based on fundamentals. Instead, such trading moves prices away from fundamentals for extended periods, with significant result […]
Read moreThe survey of private sector economists released by the Department of Finance today offers up a pretty bleak forecast that the national unemployment rate will average 8.5% in 2010, up a bit from the 8.3% average in 2009 and up a bit from 8.4% last month (December, 2009) . http://www.fin.gc.ca/n10/data/2010-08_1e.pdf That forecast strikes me as pretty much bang on or […]
Read moreOxfam are seeking endorsements of this letter by professional economists. If you want to sign on, please notify Sophie Freeman: SFreeman@Oxfam.org.uk Dear G20 As economists from across the world, we call on you to implement a financial transaction tax (FTT). This tax is an idea that has come of age. The financial crisis has shown us the dangers of unregulated […]
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