The Progressive Economics Forum

            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.
            [...]

Statsitics 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 [...]

I 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 [...]

I’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 [...]

Here we go with another media frenzy celebrating the official “end of the recession.”  Truly, this time.  We really mean it.
Harken back to July 23 of this year, when Mark Carney made it official the first time, declaring in his monetary policy update that the economy was back in the black.  His bold declaration made [...]

One dimension of today’s dismal jobs report that hasn’t received enough attention yet is the continuing slide in labour force participation.  It declined again to 67.0 percent (following a bigger decline last month that was the crucial ingredient in September’s counter-intuitive reduction in the unemployment rate).
The participation rate hasn’t been lower since July 2002 — [...]

The loonie’s spectacular flight toward parity with the greenback (and likely beyond) seems to know no bounds.  It’s climbed by over 25 percent in 7 months; its flight began the same day global stock markets turned the corner back in March.  There’s no reason why this appreciation, the steepest in our history, should stop at mere [...]

I had been girding my loins yesterday, with the release of StatsCan’s July GDP numbers, for another orgy of triumphalist headlines: “The Recovery Is Nigh! All is Good! Stop Worrying!  Nothing to See Here, Folks!  Just Go About Your Business!”
After all, Chrysler’s two humongous Canadian assembly plants went back to work in July (after a 6-week [...]

I want to share with everyone a new CAW resource that was produced for our Constitutional Convention (which took place last month in Quebec City).
It’s a 4-page cartoon book explaining the core dynamics of financial cycles, that was illustrated and deesigned by Tony Biddle — the awesome Toronto political cartoonist who also illustrated Economics for [...]

            This week marks the one-year anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers: the darkest moment of the global financial crisis, when those in charge genuinely feared for the survival of their system.
           This somber anniversary has sparked a modest flurry of retrospection in the media.  But the dominant tone (Michael Moore’s new movie aside, [...]

I’ve always been annoyed by the trite, horse-race-style coverage of financial markets that dominates so much of what passes for economics journalism in Canada (especially in the electronic media).
How many 2-minute “market updates” do we really need, anyway?  I typically hear 4 or more on the radio any given workday, just getting to and from [...]

Further to my recent post about the current mini wave of industrial unrest in Canada, and who should wear the blame for it…
Now we have the latest developments at Air Canada, where the Machinists local has rejected a tentative multi-union agreement which would have deferred Air Canada’s pension contributions in hopes of seeing the company [...]

The economy is in trouble, and millions of people around the world are suffering (in various ways and to various extremes), because of the failure of a deregulated profit-driven private-sector financial industry.
I think that statement is largely unquestionable.
You would think, logically, that this fact should put the free-market private sector on the defensive.  Ironically, however, [...]

Erin Weir had a highly useful post on this subject a few days ago.  Now here’s a chance to take some action: The Centre for Research on Work and Society at York is circulating the Open Statement below regarding the U.S. debate over the Employee Free Choice Act, and certain arguments that have been made [...]

In all the kerfuffle around Finance Minister Flaherty’s $50 billion deficit projection, the cost of the joint federal-Ontario support for the restructuring of GM and Chrysler has been getting a lot of attention.
But while that restructuring support is an important and expensive undertaking, there’s no way it should be fingered as the major cause (or [...]

One enormous myth that has been propagated (sometimes innocently, sometimes not) in recent debates over the future of the auto industry is the false notion that auto workers “make” $75 per hour.
Autoworkers don’t remotely make that much money — yet the lie has been repeated often enough, I am amazed at how many people actually [...]

A lot of people I meet these days ask about the risk of a future surge in inflation, or even a return to “hyperinflation,” as a result of government’s efforts around the world to stimulate spending and demand — in part through large deficits, and in part through very loose and unorthodox monetary policy (including, [...]

Posted below is my Globe and Mail column this week raising questions about whether troubled companies can really “cut their way to viability.”
When companies face trouble, the knee-jerk response is always to cut back: close plants, reduce headcount, cut compensation.  Reflecting their shorter-term time horizon (and their consequent hunger for a faster payback), financial markets [...]

I have enjoyed being one of the three economists appearing on the occasional “Bottom Line” panel which CBC TV has been running on its National News.  My fellow panelists (Patricia Croft from RBC Securities and Mark Mullins of the Fraser Institute) are personable, informed, and for the most part non-dogmatic about things.  (I know it [...]

OK this one is a bit nerdy, I admit it.
I’ve been working on various popular education tools to go along with Economics for Everyone (my economics “textbook” for unionists and other activists), trying to make the material as accessible and entertaining as possible — and making it as easy as possible for local activists to [...]

The downturn in global trade is stunning — a sure sign that this is no garden-variety slowdown we are experiencing.  And in Canada’s case, the cyclical downturn in trade lies on top of a deeper structural change: our increased reliance on resource exports, which produced (via Dutch Disease mechanisms) a corresponding shift of output and [...]

File this one under “painfully ironic”:
The Ontario Securities Commission (public agency charged with monitoring the behaviour of the stock market industry) recently advertized for a Senior Economist.  Duties include collecting & interpreting data, monitoring developments in securities markets, helping Commission staff understand economic concepts, blah blah blah.
The fun part is the compensation: competitive salary, benefits, [...]

Another dismal jobs report for December, with 34,000 more jobs gone (71,000 full-time losses) and the unemployment rate jumping a third of a point in a single month, has got everyone now wondering:  How high will the unemployment rate go in this recession?
The “consensus” view of the mainstream economics world is something like this: unemployment will [...]

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has just released a comparison of manufacturing output, employment, productivity, and unit labour costs in 16 different industrialized countries.  Here’s the link:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/prod4.pdf
This data confirms that Canada’s manufacturing industry is in the midst of a uniquely terrible crisis.  Some commentators have suggested that the sharp decline in Canadian manufacturing is [...]

I am thrilled to report that the Progressive Economics Forum has met our $50,000 fund-raising goal for an endowment fund to support the Galbraith Prize in Economics and Social Justice in perpetuity.
 
Thank you very much to those who helped out with this project.  A special thank you to Kevin Young who helped a lot with identifying [...]

As the debacle on Wall Street continues to unfold, how will it all affect the election up here?  So far, Harper’s team is not “wearing” the uncertainty and insecurity that people feel regarding the economy, to nearly the extent that they should.  I think that partly reflects the lack of concerted attack on economic issues [...]

We all know the Conservatives are the “rational economic managers,” right?  After all, their tax cuts, free trade agreements, and tough-love social policy are all motivated by the need to free the entrepreneurial beast within us, and allow us to pursue our natural proclivity to truck and trade with wild abandon.  The productivity of the [...]

What a cliff-hanger!  0.3% annualized growth for the 2Q, and no “official recession” (not yet, anyway).  I win my own pool (with my 0.2% guess).  I will devote my winnings to the CCPA.  The other guesses are posted in the comments section of the original recession-watch blog post here:
http://www.progressive-economics.ca/2008/08/09/jimbos-official-recession-watch-lottery/
Couple of tidbits in today’s GDP numbers:
1. [...]

Am I the only one who detected a distinct note of spin-doctoring in the write-up of Statistics Canada’s eye-popping labour force release yesterday?
Here are the first two paragraphs of the release:
“Following gains at the beginning of 2008, and little change from April to June, employment dropped by 55,000 in July. The unemployment rate edged down 0.1 percentage points to 6.1%, as [...]

Friday’s eye-popping employment numbers (55,000 lost jobs, the worst one-month toll since the 1991 recession), combined with the previous week’s negative GDP numbers (down 0.1% in May, the fourth decline in six months), have raised once again the spectre that Canada’s total economy is teetering on the edge of “official” recession.
The suspense is growing as [...]