This 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 […]
Read moreAdvocates of the Harmonized Sales Tax often suggest that it will support Ontario’s beleaguered manufacturing sector. They emphasize that the current Provincial Sales Tax applies not only to finished products purchased by consumers, but also to some inputs purchased by businesses. As one business sells components to another, sales tax could be paid repeatedly along the supply chain. This “cascading†[…]
Read moreThe Global Labour University are publishing Global Labour Columns on the general theme of how labour should be responding to the crisis. The most recent is by yours truly, re working some pieces previously posted to this blog. The other columns posted are well worth a look. http://column.global-labour-university.org/
Read moreToday’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) release paints a significantly improved picture of the Canadian economy. GDP rose by 0.4% in November. Statistics Canada also revised upward its previously released figures. GDP grew by 0.3% instead of 0.2% in October and 0.5% instead of 0.4% in September. While these figures are encouraging, they imply a slower annual growth rate than the 5.7% […]
Read moreIf you want to be reminded of the myriad of ways in which markets fail, you will welcome the new and timely book by John Cassidy titled simply How Markets Fail. Cassidy is not only an economist but a rare one who can write. Indeed, he writes so well that he is a regular contributor to the writerly The New […]
Read moreThe content in the EI report by myself and Sylvain Schetagne which was released by the CCPA yesterday won’t be new to readers of this blog – an updating of trends in unemployment and EI use to show that tens of thousands of workers who lost their jobs early in the Great Recession are and will soon be exhausting benefits […]
Read moreA new study published today by the Frontier Institute for Public Policy finds that Vancouver has the most unaffordable urban housing market not just in Canada, but in all of Australia, Ireland, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. This conclusion is based on a very simple, yet effective measure of housing affordability: the ratio of median housing […]
Read moreSTEERING COMMITTEE OF PROVINCIAL/TERRITORIAL MINISTERS ON PENSION COVERAGE AND RETIREMENT INCOME ADEQUACY OPTIONS FOR INCREASING PENSION COVERAGE AMONG PRIVATE SECTOR WORKERS IN CANADA EXECUTIVE SUMMARY This paper released by BC Finance Minister Colin Hansen for the provincial/territorial ministers indicates much more fundamental problems with our pension system than those identified in the Mintz Report and gives serious consideration to the […]
Read moreI’ve been very pleasantly surprised at the public response to the tragic earthquake in Haiti. I’ve seen donations being collected through school bake sales, at the liquor store, and on Hockey Night in Canada, among the usual channels for such stuff. It’s nice to know that, collectively, we care, in spite of the neglect of Haiti by our elected governments […]
Read moreOn the eve of the Whitehorse meeting of Finance Ministers in December, the Howe released a report co-authored by Bill Robson which charged that the federal government’s pension plan liabilities on behalf of its own employees are greatly under-stated – to the tune of $58 billion. This sum should, he argued, be added to the federal public debt. http://www.cdhowe.org/pdf/backgrounder_122.pdf As […]
Read moreThe number of Canadians receiving regular Employment Insurance (EI) benefits declined by 7,300 in November. As always, we do not know whether these workers found jobs or simply ran out of benefits. The Labour Force Survey indicated higher employment and slightly lower unemployment that month, which supports a positive interpretation. Following these declines in recipients and in unemployment, the proportion […]
Read moreI’m still coming out of my malaise following the Copenhagen climate conference in December. It’s easy to think that the stupid political brinksmanship is never going to end, and the focus of attention will shift to adaptive measures. But what is more likely is a few more Katrina scale disasters that will serve to spur rapid action, and we’ll then […]
Read moreThe obvious headline from today’s Statistics Canada release is inflation rising to 1.3% in December, its highest level in almost a year. However, the Consumer Price Index actually decreased between November and December. The overall price level was down 0.3% in absolute terms and 0.1% on a seasonally-adjusted basis. The annual inflation rate rose only due to a lower base […]
Read moreThe case for a Financial Transactions Tax or FTT has crept in from the margins remarkably quickly. One year ago, the proposal for an internationally co-ordinated “Tobin Tax†on foreign exchange transactions was a dim memory from the early part of the decade. Today, the idea of broadening such a tax to include a far wider range of transactions such […]
Read moreThe Global Labour University are publishing an interesting series of Global Labour Columns. The most recent by Patrick Belser – author of the ILO Global Wage Report – looks at the impact of the Great Recession on wages. http://column.global-labour-university.org/2010/01/why-we-should-care-about-wages.html “Focusing on unemployment rates alone understates the true extent of the deterioration of employment and conditions of work in labour markets. […]
Read moreStraight Goods contacted me last week for an article about what the federal Conservatives might cut to balance the budget. This concern is understandable given the previous Liberal government’s slash-and-burn approach to deficits. At a minimum, the Conservatives may use the deficit as cover to remove funding from particular programs or organizations that they dislike. However, the Conservatives do not […]
Read moreThere is an interesting piece on productivity in today’s Daily looking at the changing relationship between output change and employment change in recessions, over time and as between Canada and the US. One part of the story is that employers used to hoard labour during recessions, but are now inclined to cut jobs and hours quickly in response to a […]
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