The Bank of Canada recently announced an end to two short-term lending programs it introduced at the start of the pandemic. Their winding down is welcome news: it means the bank has been successful in stabilizing financial markets. But now comes the tricky part: encouraging economic expansion, which traditionally is inflationary, even while reassuring buyers of Canadian governments’ bonds it will not help these governments inflate away the debts they are incurring.
Key to such a strategy is recommitting, alongside the federal government, to the two per cent inflation target, even as short-term tactics may require temporary overshooting of it. Sticking with a target you may decide to miss temporarily is a mixed message, meaning…
The established order of things in international trade, the world we have been comfortable with for decades, has been shattered. This is often laid at Donald Trump’s door, given his disdain for the World Trade Organization (WTO) and relish for unilateral actions like tariff surcharges. In reality, the global trading system was in trouble before Trump’s arrival on the scene. He and Robert Lighthizer, his spear-carrier as U.S. Trade Representative, have just been the instruments of disruption, bringing all of the inadequacies and shortcomings of the WTO system to the forefront.
Before Trump was elected, I believed that, whatever its shortcomings, the key legal principles and multilaterally respected norms governing the global…
William Robson: Government spending looks cheap today — but that won't last - Financial Post Op-Ed
Looked at one way, the federal government’s recent musings about spending tens — even hundreds — of billions more dollars on a raft of new programs seem weird. Nobody thought we could afford such a binge before COVID hammered our economy. How is it a great idea afterward?
Look at it another way, however, and the magical thinking in Ottawa is easier to understand. The crisis pushed the federal government’s revenues down and its spending up. Directionally, that is fine. But a mind-boggling two-thirds hike in program expenses this year has driven the apparent tax cost of a dollar of program spending through the floor. Federal largesse has never looked cheaper.
How cheap? July’s fiscal snapshot suggested Ottawa’s revenue,…
