Canada

In 2012, I started the subscriber newsletter out with Ten Surprises for 2012. The goal was to give Credit Writedowns Pro subscribers a list of things that investors only assigned one in three odds of occurring that I believed had a fifty…

Drawing on research by the IMF's Hites Ahir and Prakash Loungani, the chart compares the house-price-to-rent ratio compared with the historical average. This is a standard measure of valuation. Clearly by such a metric, the recovery in…

People want to see tight fiscal policy and loose monetary policy if stimulus is necessary. That is current policy orthodoxy and it will continue to be the case until at least the next cyclical downturn. If policy makers can ride out this…

I have two topics I want to highlight this morning. First, there are the US housing inflation numbers from Case Shiller, which are at a 7-year high. Then there is the fiscal drag in the US, Denmark, the UK, the Euro Zone and Canada. What I…

This is a more in-depth follow-up piece to the free article I wrote yesterday. In the wake of the recent Ira Sohn conference and the revelation that hedge funds are starting to short housing-related Canadian stocks, there is a lot of bubble…

Yesterday, the Teranet-National Bank National Composite House Price Index for Canada was released. It showed that 12-month home price inflation in Canada was down to 2.0%, the lowest level since November 2009. And given the huge amount of…

Some recent data out of Canada points to a slowdown in growth of consumer indebtedness. According to RBC, the non-mortgage consumer debt has grown at the slowest rate in 20 years. This is clearly a positive development, but when taking…

By Marc Chandler The shockingly disappointing non-farm payrolls growth of 88k has sent the dollar reeling. The 61k upward revisions to the Jan and March figures and the smaller than expected trade deficit were not sufficient offsets.…

The US jobs data was consistent with the recent string of data clearly showing a surprising resilience to the anticipation and tightening of fiscal policy. The Canadian employment data was also stronger than expected.

Analysts are beginning to raise concerns about Canada's near-term economic growth. The nation's central bank is holding the overnight rate at 1% and will likely maintain this level for some time to come.