Bank of Canada Will Not Be Happy With This Inflation Report Canada’s headline inflation rate ticked down slightly last month to 6.9%, but measures of core inflation remain stubbornly high, and food prices hit a 41-year high. Lower gasoline prices were primarily responsible for the decline in inflation in the past three months. Bond markets sold off on the immediate […]
Orderly Housing Correction Continues There are many unusual aspects to the current housing correction, but fundamentally the most noteworthy is how orderly and non-chaotic it has been. Home sales have slowed, but so have new listings, so the price declines are more muted than we might have expected. This is not a housing collapse. It is a housing correction. We’ve […]
Labour market strength was readily apparent across the major North American economies Canada’s labour market performance in September is strong enough to keep the central bank on its hawkish rate-hike path, according to economist Sherry Cooper. The market saw the addition of approximately 21,000 jobs last month, with increases in both full-time and part-time work. Wage rates also increased by […]
Tight Labour Market Fuels Higher Wages Today’s Labour Force Survey showed that employment grew in September for the first time in four months. Job gains remained moderate despite the high number of vacancies, indicating how tight the job market remains. Wage rates rose 5.2% year-over-year (y/y), the fourth consecutive month for which wage gains exceeded 5%. The jobless rate ticked […]
Forty-Three Years Ago, I Was Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s Special Assistant Inflation appears to be book-ending my career. I started my work as an economist in the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, D.C., in the late 1970s. Inflation had been trending higher for years. Neither Arthur Burns nor G. William Miller, the Fed chairmen preceding Volcker, […]