Raising the age of eligibility for Old Age Security/Guaranteed Income Supplement (OAS/GIS) benefits is the worst possible way to deal with the retirement income security crisis facing Canadians. Experts such…
The CLC today celebrated Corporate Tax Freedom Day – defined as the day on which corporations have paid their share of all government taxes. It featured a race of mechanical…
Today’s IMF economic update further downgrades growth projections, including here in Canada where growth in 2012 is forecast to be just 1.7%, down from the IMF’s September forecast of 1.9%.…
Last Thursday I was at an event on the issue of rising income inequality, sponsored by Canada 2020. It featured one of the authors of the recent OECD report on…
There is a special, free on line, issue of the Cambridge Journal of Economics with what look to be very interesting contributions from the progressive side of the spectrum.
Further to my earlier post on this topic, whether or not we are or will soon be experiencing labour and skills shortages is a question of critical importance to the…
The Mark have published a pre Budget commentary from yours truly.
Statistics Canada’s “real” (R8 supplementary) unemployment rate adds to unemployed persons some labour force dropouts (discouraged job seekers who have given up looking for a job in the belief that…
Michael Mendelson has posted a long comment on my earlier post regarding the Mowat Report on EI. He defends Caledon’s proposal for temporary non EI income support for the unemployed…
Larry Summers has contributed to a new Financial Times series on Capitalism in Crisis. It merits a read, as an example of tortured reasoning. Summers is the consummate insider neo…
Canada’s population, we are frequently told, is rapidly aging. The big baby boomer cohort is headed out of the workforce, meaning that we face a future of very slow labour…
(Erin beat me to it but there is some new content here.) Capping a very weak last quarter, Canada’s job market ended 2011 badly as the national unemployment rate rose…
Don Drummond confesses that he has been wrong to believe that changes in public policies – such as free trade, cuts to corporate taxes, low inflation, the introduction of the…
Amidst the plethora of media reports on “payroll tax” increases for 2012, there was little mention of increases in benefits. There are, of course, two sides to social insurance programs.…
The federal government has failed to take up an historic opportunity to lock in ultra low interest rates on long term Government of Canada bonds. Normally – as outlined in…
“Other People’s Money” by Justin Cartwright (Bloomsbury, 2011) is to the novel what the wonderful “Margin Call” is to film – a fictionalized but convincing account of high finance and…
As is well known, the youth unemployment rate remains high, and well above average. It stood at 14.1% in November or more than double the unemployment rate of 6.3% for…
Mark Carney’s widely publicized speech on the state of the global and domestic economy is worth a careful read. He is bang on in much of his analysis of what…
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,…
Here is the first newsletter of what promises to be a very worthwhile initiative.
