The Progressive Economics Forum

Today, the Government of Saskatchewan announced that it is engaging the Conference Board of Canada to analyze the proposed Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan takeover.
My first thought is to hope that the Conference Board does a better job on potash than it did on TILMA.
My second thought is, “Doesn’t Saskatchewan have a civil service?” Presumably, the [...]

I got this wrong first time round. Krugman commends Nick Rowe over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative for his spirited views and writing on monetary policy.

One million. No, it’s not the number of posts that Armine has written about the census. (I count only 32.)
A million is the number of times this blog has been viewed since Marc started it back in the summer of 2006. It has been an eventful few years in Canadian economics: the commodity “super cycle,” [...]

The Macdonald-Laurier Institute, which has been leading the charge against mostly unidentified “inter-provincial trade barriers,” is now posting complaints about the “intrusive” census long form.
Are different-sized cream containers in various provinces and having to spend 20 minutes filling out a form once every couple of decades really the worst problems facing libertarians in Canada? If [...]

Over at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, Robert Knox has tried to rebut my rebuttal of his C. D. Howe Institute paper. (I am still waiting for a rebuttal of my rebuttal of his more recent Macdonald-Laurier Institute paper.)
Knox’s post sheds light on how his side of the debate sees the issue. But I begin with the [...]

There has been a persistent drumbeat in the American business press about corporations accumulating cash. The argument is that, while corporations are making solid profits now, they are not investing in the US for fear of anti-business policies in the future. Obama has allegedly spooked corporate America into hoarding cash rather than investing.
To test that [...]

The front page of today’s Globe and Mail (Ontario Edition) proclaims, “Supercorp is dead.”
The story goes on to note, “many government insiders have suggested that opponents of a potential deal got too much of a head start on framing the issue.” Indeed, this blog got a head start framing the issue back in December, when [...]

The notion that tariffs caused the Great Depression has been repeatedly invoked in opposition to allegedly protectionist policies and to press ahead with deregulatory “free trade” deals. Also, the current collapse of international trade is sometimes cited to suggest a rising tide of protectionism today.
Yesterday, Paul Krugman had an excellent post debunking the underlying claim [...]

Through a series of speeches and Financial Post op-eds, former cabinet minister Maxime Bernier has been setting out an uncompromising right-wing agenda. He had Andrew Coyne applauding his proposal to freeze public spending. He had Stephen Gordon tweeting in support of his proposal to eliminate corporate taxes.
But his latest proposal has already been rebuked by Gordon [...]

Among TV financial pundits, I enjoy watching James Altucher. I have particularly appreciated his advocacy of no-nonsense quantitative easing by the European Central Bank, as opposed to the half measures unveiled so far. (My viewership has not been systematic enough to form an opinion of his stock tips.)
I was recently pleased to discover that he [...]

Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, Stephen Gordon critiques the last federal NDP platform’s reference to “Canada’s wealthiest corporations” on the grounds that people, not corporations, own things.
But as Declan points out in several pithy comments on Stephen’s post, corporations clearly can and do own things. The corporations that own the most valuable things in Canada [...]

Yesterday afternoon, I caught the subway down to Queen’s Park to find out whether the throne speech would shed any light on the provincial government’s privatization plans. As it turned out, the speech included only a couple of lines on Crown corporations.
But I ran into blogger extraordinaire Warren Kinsella at the legislature and note that [...]

A TD-Pembina-Suzuki study released seven weeks ago projected that cutting Canada’s carbon emissions by 20% below 2006 levels, or even 25% below 1990 levels, would only modestly reduce overall Canadian GDP.
Last week, Jack Mintz critiqued this study for positing a fixed amount of capital investment in Canada. Under this highly dubious assumption, climate policy only [...]

This blog flagged, and Worthwhile Canadian Initiative pursued, a striking discrepancy in July’s employment data. The Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH) indicated that employers paid 74,000 more employees.
Conversely, the Labour Force Survey (LFS) had indicated that employers paid 79,000 fewer employees in July. This difference of 153,000 exceeds 1% of Canada’s workforce.
Today’s release [...]

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 from [...]

UPDATE (October 20): The transcript of the hearing described below is now available.
. . .
Late this afternoon, I had the pleasure of serving on a Parliamentary panel composed entirely of members of the United Steelworkers union. 
My co-panellists before the Human Resources committee were Ken Georgetti, CLC President, and Rosalie Washington, a laid-off worker who would [...]

I recently questioned whether Tim Hortons’ reorganization as a Canadian corporation would bring any additional jobs or tax revenue to Canada. Aaron Wherry since did something that journalists covering the Prime Minister’s photo-op on this issue should have done: he asked the company directly. Its response is now available on the Macleans blog.
Of course, Tim [...]

Keystone Liberals
Yesterday, Andrew Coyne lambasted a Liberal Party “Reality Check” from Thursday that looks eerily similar to the table that I had posted on Monday.
Like my table, the Liberals use the words “Growth”, “Decline”, and “Britain.” By contrast, the OECD’s tables use a negative sign (instead of words) to denote declines and refer to the [...]

I recently had the pleasure of serving with Stephen Gordon on a panel about economics and blogging. Over at Worthwhile Canadian Initiative, he has been leading a one-man crusade against reducing the eligibility requirement for Employment Insurance (EI) benefits to 360 hours.
His stated goal is to provide better protection for unemployed workers and counter-cyclical fiscal [...]

Marc Lee predicted a deficit a year ago (in a paper that graciously acknowledged comments from Toby and me.) Our blog was also ahead of the curve on some other aspects of Budget 2009.
I flagged the Equalization cuts the morning after the November 2008 Economic Statement, when they received little attention. These cuts have since become a [...]

Last year was a momentous one for Relentlessly Progressive Economics.
Of course, some of us continued using the blog to disseminate media commentary on behalf of our respective organizations. However, the Progressive Economics Forum (PEF) itself attracted media coverage a couple of times.
Early in the year, The National Post and other CanWest papers cited it for documenting [...]

Declan picks up on Stephen’s suggestion that economists were too diffident to raise concerns about the real estate bubble:
How to square the group of economists in the front pages of the paper offering a series of right wing prescriptions supported by neither fact nor theory with the economist unwilling to point out a housing bubble [...]

Ezra Klein at American Prospect has already commented on some footage that I just saw on CNN.
Paul Krugman marshalled his critique of Obama’s stimulus plan from his blog onto the op-ed page of today’s New York Times. A front-page story in the same newspaper suggests that Democratic legislators have been reading Krugman. Obama responded by [...]

Duncan Cameron’s comment about the role of agriculture in climate change prompted me to take a closer look at greenhouse-gas emissions from sources other than burning fossil fuels.
The final column of the following table is a sectoral breakdown of row 8 from yesterday’s table. All of these emissions are exempt from the Liberal Green Shift.

 Sector

 Fuel [...]

Last Tuesday’s episode of Politics featured Barb Byers on changes to (Un)Employment Insurance and Michael Ignatieff on the humanitarian crisis in Burma. I naturally agree with Byers, but get nervous whenever Ignatieff starts talking tough about the Responsibility to ProtectTM, the doctrine that he invoked to promote the invasion of Iraq.
Ignatieff did not really answer Don [...]

In his latest Maclean’s column, Paul Wells suggests that the Prime Minister’s apparent anger toward various public officials and agencies reflects not his personality, but his ideological crusade against government.
Of course, as Wells observes, the Canadian state was greatly diminished during the years preceding Harper’s government. However, Harper undoubtedly aims to continue the trend and [...]

Yesterday’s Toronto Star contained an interesting article on Leo Gerard, “the most influential Canadian-born Democratic power broker in the United States.”

Thomas Palley has posted a good discussion of the relationship between economic theory and policy, which includes a useful taxonomy of contemporary economists.

Lynn Williams, former International President of the United Steelworkers, has posted an excellent speech on a major American blog. Although the title refers to rebuilding the labour movement, the text touches upon many of the broader policy issues discussed on our blog: how to design a stimulus package, rising inequality, public healthcare, the economics of [...]

This morning, someone viewed Relentlessly Progressive Economics for the 200,000th time.
Since reaching 100,000 views in June, our previous website has crept up to nearly 122,000 even though we added nothing to its 600 classic posts. Since being created in June, the current website has added 259 posts (including this one) and been viewed almost 79,000 [...]