I first heard the gibe that “central bankers think inflation is always and everywhere a monetary phenomenon – except this time, of course” more than 50 years ago, but it is still as good as new.
Consider the Bank of Canada, now caught in a trap of its own making. Its mandate, pending an imminent renewal, requires it to maintain inflation in a range around two per cent, but its “forward guidance,” issued incessantly for the past year, has promised to keep the overnight rate of interest at 0.25 per cent until the real economy has returned to “normal” — at a date that lately seems to have been creeping closer from its original value somewhere around the end of 2022. The Bank is stuck with two quantitative targets, one, an inflation…
While some may have been disappointed by the recent COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, it has delivered on many promises, creating expectations for the next major global gathering – the World Trade Organization’s all-important 12th Ministerial Conference (MC12), to be held in Geneva from Nov. 30 to Dec. 3.
The first meeting of WTO trade ministers in four years, the talks will test the political skills of the new WTO director-general, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, in getting consensus on a range of contentious issues. Restoring the organization’s diminishing relevance and showing it can be responsive to today’s pressing global issues (trade and climate change being at the forefront) represents a daunting challenge
American leadership on…
Canada’s competition laws do not need to be fundamentally rewritten for “big tech.” The best approach to ensuring Canadians benefit from digitization lies, not in devising new competition principles targeting a few large players, but in modernizing the application of principles we already have.
Data has always been at the heart of relations between businesses and their customers and suppliers. There has also always been a market for the attention of potential customers. What digital technologies have done is massively enhance our ability to collect and analyze this kind of data. Businesses can reach customers and suppliers on a previously unimagined scale, yet with pinpoint precision, an effect called “mass customization.”…
