Op-Eds

« C’est seulement quand la marée se retire qu’on découvre qui nageait nu », a constaté Warren Buffett pendant la crise financière de 2008. Cette fois, des investisseurs sont surpris à poil par l’effondrement de la plateforme FTX, vedette de l’univers crypto.

Des institutionnels réputés ont perdu 1,9 milliard US dans le capital de FTX, dont Ontario Teachers, BlackRock, SoftBank, Temasek et Sequoia. La Caisse, qui a brûlé 150 millions dans Celsius, est en belle compagnie.

Pire est le sort d’un million de clients pris dans un trou de 8 milliards dans les liquidités. La faillite de la deuxième plus importante plateforme de cryptos projette une onde de choc qui fera d’autres victimes.

Voici…

The Bank of Canada continued its tightening cycle on Wednesday by announcing a 50-basis-point increase in its target for the overnight rate. That came as a surprise to those who expected a 75-basis point increase, but it’s still a hefty hike.

It continues the Bank’s front-loading of its rate increases, which is intended to reduce the scale of future rate hikes. In our view, this latest increase was needed – both to reduce the harm of further increases and to re-anchor inflation expectations – but now the time has come to pause and reflect.

Since the Bank’s September 7th rate boost, the consumer price index (CPI) numbers for August and September have been published. Headline inflation ticked…

La finance durable n’est pas assez verte ! Non, elle est trop woke ! Pire, un foutu bordel ! lancent les critiques. Elle vit plutôt une crise de croissance.

Les actifs mondiaux des fonds communs de placement et des FNB (fonds négocié en Bourse) en finance durable ont triplé durant la pandémie, pour atteindre 3000 milliards de dollars américains, fin 2021.⁠1 Ils ont reculé depuis avec la correction des marchés, mais les flux restent positifs, malgré les dénonciations.

Les plus acerbes sont sorties de la bouche des gouverneurs de la Floride et du Texas, héraults de la droite dure et vaillants défenseurs du pétrole et des armes à feu.

Les tirs viennent aussi de la gauche, pour qui la…

Taxes are a necessary evil. Necessary, because we must fund government services. Evil, because they do damage beyond the cost to those who pay them – discouraging work and saving, misallocating where our scarce resources go, and encouraging underground activity. The federal government’s coming levies on banks and insurers – a corporate income surtax and the “Canada Recovery Dividend” – don’t even qualify as “necessary.”

These taxes were part of the Liberal campaign platform for last year’s federal election. The platform committed to raising the corporate income tax rate on bank and insurer profits above $1-billion from the 15 per cent other businesses pay to 18 per cent. It also proposed the Canada Recovery Dividend: a…

The Bank of Canada continued its tightening cycle last week by announcing a 75-basis-point increase in its overnight rate target. That target is now above the top end of the Bank’s estimate of the “neutral rate” of two to three per cent. But how fast will the rate go from here?

The neutral rate is the rate the Bank thinks would be appropriate for an economy producing at full capacity, with inflation running at two percent. Most economists and market-watchers believe the overnight rate needs to go beyond neutral in order to fight inflation. Despite a one-month drop in the year-over-year increase in the CPI from 8.1 per cent in June to 7.6 per cent in July, inflation is a long way above the top end of the one-to-three per cent…