Robson, Dahir - The Worrying Delay in the Release of the Federal Government’s Public Accounts
Published in The Globe and Mail.
In recent years, the federal government’s fiscal management has looked increasingly slipshod. The unprecedented deficits and buildup of debt, the explosive increase in the number and cost of federal employees, and the addition of tens of billions to the spending projections in each successive budget and fiscal update are unsettling, but so, too, is the erosion of accountability in budgets and in the public accounts.
Ottawa is delivering a fall economic statement on Monday – so late that it’s barely fall any more. The government failed to deliver a budget at all in 2020 – something that had never happened before – and presented three of the four budgets since then after the April 1 beginning…
Published in the Financial Post
The Bank of Canada, which has been lowering the overnight rate of interest following a nearly three-and-a-half-year battle with inflation, cut rates again yesterday. So: How tight does monetary policy remain in this easing cycle? How much further loosening needs to happen? And where will interest rates end up when all is said and done?
Answering these questions involves juggling two things at once. First, qualifying what the monetary policy stance actually is. Second, comparing it to a neutral stance — where the economy is producing at its potential and inflation is at its target — in order to determine whether it is loose or tight. Both are hard.
Start with the first element. For the…
Kronick, Ambler - Bank of Canada made the right call, despite conflicting data making it hard
Published in The Globe and Mail.
Before the release of Statistics Canada’s labour survey for November, markets were fairly evenly split between predicting a 25-basis-point cut by the Bank of Canada and a 50-basis-point cut. (A basis point is one-hundredths of a percentage point.) The increase in the unemployment rate to 6.8 per cent in November, up from 6.5 per cent in October, shifted those predictions toward 50 basis points. This is what the Bank of Canada announced Wednesday morning.
The reason that market participants were hedging their bets is that the economic data were sending mixed signals, and there is a certain elephant south of the border creating uncertainty.
We think the Bank of Canada made the right move…
