The best lessons from abroad about reopening our economies are in Europe - Globe and Mail Op-Ed
With encouraging signs on the COVID-19 health front, and mounting evidence of the costs of containing it, attention has shifted to the world’s economies. This is a global pandemic, and many countries have begun to reopen on their own terms. Here in Canada, governments in Ontario, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick have announced plans for lifting some constraints.
What can we learn from progress elsewhere?
Many jurisdictions we would like to imitate – Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong – are in a class of their own. They imposed targeted travel checks and restrictions early, built capacity exceeding ours to test for exposure to the virus or produce protective equipment, and implemented electronic monitoring…
“Our business is at an inflection point. We can continue down the path we’ve been on … or we can make the significant and difficult changes necessary, ” said Gavin Hattersley, Molson Coors CEO to The Globe and Mail recently, and so it may be with health care after COVID-19. Many crises have been predicted to produce lasting changes to society’s status quo ante, changes subsequently proven minimal to ephemeral, as Andrew Coyne recently noted his column in The Globe. It is just possible, however, likely even, that some long-advocated changes to health care’s organizational structure and ways of working will have been shown to be so effective that they will remain imbedded in the “new normal” when…
Bank of Canada's unprecedented actions mean there may be inflation ahead - Financial Post Op-Ed
The Bank of Canada’s rate announcement last week — no change — was no surprise. But the effects of its asset purchases could be. The Bank had already lowered the target rate to its effective lower bound of 0.25 per cent, so a further cut was not expected. The Bank didn’t say so but the rate may stay where it is for a while.
The Bank did discuss expansions to quantitative easing (QE), however. How QE will play out for monetary policy, and especially the inflation target, is cause for concern. In its Monetary Policy Report and subsequent press conference, the Bank emphasized that its actions to date have been oriented towards supporting the smooth functioning of financial and credit markets. A focus on financial stability at a time…
