Little Comfort for the Bank of Canada in Today’s Jobs Report Today’s Labour Force Survey for November will do little to assuage the Bank of Canada’s concern about inflation. While employment growth slowed to 10,100 net new jobs–down sharply from October’s reading–the report’s underlying details point to excess labour demand and rising wages. This is […]

Bank of Canada Will Not Be Happy With This Inflation Report Not only did the headline CPI inflation rate stall at 6.9% last month, but the core CPI numbers remain stubbornly high. Food inflation–a highly visible component–edged down slightly. Still, prices for food purchased from stores (+11.0%) continued to increase faster year over year than the […]

Very Strong Employment Report For October Today’s Labour Force Survey for October was surprisingly strong, boosting wage inflation to an eye-popping 5.6% year-over-year pace. While good news for the economy, this is terrible news for the inflation fight–just when the Bank of Canada eased its foot on the brakes. The two-year and five-year Government of […]

The Bank of Canada Slowed the Pace of Monetary Tightening The Governing Council of the Bank of Canada raised its target for the overnight policy rate by 50 basis points today to 3.75% and signalled that the policy rate would rise further. The Bank is also continuing its policy of quantitative tightening (QT), reducing its holdings […]

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Inflation Cooled Again in August, But Higher Rates Still Coming Canada’s headline inflation rate cooled again in August, even a bit more than expected. The consumer price index rose 7.0% from a year ago, down from 7.6% in July and a forty-year high of 8.1% in June, mainly on the back of lower gasoline prices. […]

Housing Softens Again in August The full effects of the most recent rate hikes have not yet manifested. Statistics released today by the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA) show that the slowdown that began in March in response to higher interest rates continued in August, albeit at a slower pace. Home sales recorded over Canadian MLS® […]