The Progressive Economics Forum

The conventional line has been, no. Our banks were strong. Unlike the US and Europe, no bailout was needed to deal with the global financial crisis of 2008. This line, of course, always conveniently neglected the Extraordinary Financing Framework, or dismissed it as trivial. Now Finance Minister Flaherty – seeking new powers to turn down [...]

Here is an amazing multimedia article published by Bloomberg Markets Magazine in the U.S., that lists all of the individual banks which received financial assistance from the U.S. Federal Reserve during the 2008-09 crisis.  It shows each bank’s peak borrowing from the Fed, the number of days they held the funds, and the timeline for [...]

What do banks actually DO?  Create credit out of thin air. Were Canadian banks bailed-out?  Absolutely, to the tune of $200 billion.  And they are still protected and subsidized more than any other sector of the economy. What must be done with these banks?  Tax them, control them, and ultimately take them back. Those are [...]

I hung out a while yesterday at the Vancouver Occupation, and was impressed with their efforts at radical democracy. Many in the mainstream press have been quick to pile on for how time-consuming decision-making can be under this model, but perhaps they have not spent enough time in legislatures and committee meetings and public consultations. [...]

There’s a disturbing trend buried in this morning’s report by Statscan on Canada’s foreign direct investment (FDI) abroad.  Not only is an increasing share of Canadian direct investment abroad going through finance and insurance industries, but a growing share is also being funnelled into tax havens. The finance and insurance now accounts for over 52% of all [...]

The Progressive Economics Forum has the following line-up of sessions for this year’s Canadian Economics Association conference on June 3-5 at the University of Ottawa. Thanks very much to Nick Falvo for coordinating our conference activities and putting this schedule together. We are also hosting a summer school the day before and announcing our essay [...]

Here are the most important facts about the Tax Free Savings Account. Will blog further on this tomorrow. Introduction of the Tax Free Savings Account: January 1, 2009, right at the height of the economic meltdown What’s new: Stephen Harper promises to double the contribution limits to the Tax Free Savings Account, from $5,000 a [...]

Michael Lewis has a great article in today’s Toronto Star about the windfall that banks are reaping from corporate tax cuts. He quotes three of our favourite bloggers: Toby Sanger, Armine Yalnizyan and Jim Stanford. He also cites a BMO Capital Markets report that I shared with him. Since BMO appears to have removed this [...]

One nice thing about Canada’s financial regulatory architecture is the provision that the bank act must be reviewed every 5 years.  This gives us all a time to take stock of the direction that bank regulation is heading.   This is the year we are due for the Bank Act review. After a couple of years of [...]

Gabriella Moldonado looked like someone who was thoroughly whipped by life. This past October I was standing on the front stoop of her sagging home in Laredo, Texas, interviewing the middle-aged, portly woman for a television documentary about Mexico’s drug cartel wars. Laredo is a city of 230,000 that lies on the Rio Grande river [...]

Sometimes the crudest forms of Marxist analysis of the relationship between class and politics make the most sense. Read this  scorching commentary by Simon Johnson – the former IMF Chief Economist turned ubercritic of the power of the big banks -  on the appointment of  a senior Wall Street figure, Bill Daley from Morgan Stanley, [...]

It’s a funny old economy we live in. The release of today’s national balance sheet accounts has aroused great concern about the rise of the ratio of household debt to personal disposable income to a new record of 148%. Mark Carney and our banks want – quite rightly – to discourage further borrowing to prevent [...]

In the current battle against an all-out conflagration in Euroland, markets are twitchy about European (and other) banks in the event that the firefighters don’t get ahead of the blaze.  If markets lose confidence in those large banks exposed to the problems in Europe (or anywhere else, for that matter), the next chapter in the [...]

What are banks for?  Typically, banks are described as intermediaries that take deposits and lend them out, earning what is called net interest margin on the gap between what is paid on the savings and what is earned on loans.  From where I stand, this description is wrong on three counts. First, it suggests that [...]

An open letter to the world at large: “Bank shareholders rejoice.  Pension funds rebound.  Hark, the Globe and Mail comes bearing good news my brothers and sisters.   Yes, the drums beat steady.  The heart skips irregularly.  The palms sweat profusely.  Because soon, soon, the big banks will engage in our society’s number one passtime.  Well [...]

In line with a major shift in thinking at the OECD and the IMF on the most appropriate timing for “exit strategies” from fiscal stimulus, the G20 finance ministers dropped the usual call for continued stimulus through 2010 from their June 5 communique, and highlighted the need for more or less immediate fiscal consolidation. God [...]

The Canadian Bankers Association are deeply opposed to meddling with a pension system which they say is working just fine.  Which is understandable, albeit self-serving, given their dominance of the high fee mutual fund industry and the significant profits earned on spreads between low interest GICs and bank lending. The banks do just fine out [...]

This morning Oxfam launched their “Robin Hood”  (financial transactions) tax campaign in Canada with a press conference in Ottawa and the launch of their website.   Together with Oxfam officials, I spoke in favour of the tax from an economics perspective and Dale Marshall from the David Suzuki Foundation talked about how revenue raised from it [...]

Here is some of what Terry Corcoran wrote in today’s Financial Post about Bank of Canada Governor Mark “Carney’s suggestion that Canadian business has so far ‘disappointed’ because it has failed to revive Canada’s lagging productivity”: Central bankers appear to know many things, and have big fancy computer systems and economic models to tell them [...]

The Canadian dollar is again becoming more overvalued. After dipping as low as 92 US cents at the end of October, it rocketed up to 96 US cents so far today. Meanwhile, the OECD has released another month of purchasing-power data. Although the loonie’s average price on foreign-exchange markets edged up between August and September, [...]

Debate is heating up about whether the Bank of Canada should or will intervene in currency markets to lower the Canadian dollar (as I have been proposing for three months). Today’s two-cent drop in the exchange rate may indicate that currency traders are anticipating this possibility. Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen Gordon objected to recent comments [...]

Canada likes to think of itself as the country that emerged from the financial crisis squeaky clean. Too bad it is abdicating a leadership role in creating a safer financial system going forward. The issue is bonuses paid to top executives in the financial sector. It looks like the Europeans and Americans have hammered out [...]

Last night, I saw the North American premiere of Michael Moore’s latest movie at the Toronto International Film Festival. Ironically, it was held in the Visa Screening Room, which grants preferential access to bearers of Visa Gold, Platinum or Infinite credit cards. (The unwashed masses who use MasterCard, AMEX or lower grades of Visa waited [...]

The conventional wisdom seems to be that the  financial situation of Canadian  households is generally sound and certainly much better than that of our profligate and heavily indebted American neighbours.  The Bank of Canada argued in its end of 2008 Financial System Review that  “(O)verall, despite a modest deterioration, the financial position of the Canadian [...]

Here’s an extremely well-written and cogent commentary on the state of the banking system and the grim consequences  for the rest of us, especially in the UK, by novelist John Lanchester, from the London Review of Books. He’s at work on a book on the same topic http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n10/lanc01_.html

My personal theory as to why the Canadian banking system survived the great global financial crisis relatively unscathed is that calls by the big Canadian banks in the late 1990s to allow mergers were successfully resisted. Had the big banks been allowed to merge to pursue their global ambitions, they would have ramped up their [...]

Below is a dispatch on bond rating agencies from my former CCPA colleague, Stuart Murray: Here is some more grist for the blog.  Bloomberg just published a very interesting and informative article on the role of the bond rating agencies in the current meltdown. http://bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=au4oIx.judz4&refer=home The pitchforks are out for Moody’s and S&P, as they [...]

Ah plastic. What’s not to love? Convenient? Check. Light in the pocket? Check. Monthly bill summaries? Check. Free short-term credit? Check (provided you pay your bills in full, on time). Benefits (free car rental insurance, points, cash back etc): Check AND… Take from the poor and give to the rich? err… wait a minute. Unfortunately, [...]

A couple of weeks back, I posted on the topic of “quantitative easing,” the policy of having the central bank aggressively purchase government (and possibly corporate) debt in the open market ostensibly to increase the money supply. I argued that at best, quantitative easing was a pricing operation that worked at the margin by increasing [...]

There has been much talk, of late, about the ineffectiveness of conventional monetary policy — i.e., lowering the target for the overnight interest rate to incite borrowing and hence economic expansion — and the need for monetary authorities to consider something more dramatic, like so-called “quantitative  easing” — the active buying of government debt and [...]