Justin Trudeau’s government made every effort on Wednesday to convince Canadians the country can afford a budget deficit that will soar to 16% of economic output this year. Its actions suggest there’s some worry.
Rapid economic growth in the emerging worlds has placed downward pressure of manufacturing wages in the advanced world. With increasingly lower real interest rates putting upwards pressure on asset prices, these twin forces have the propensity to accelerate income inequality. What do the facts say?
Consumer price inflation decreased by 0.3 percentage points to 0.5 per cent in the year to May 2020, as per data released by the ONS. Our new analysis of 89,142 locally collected goods and services indicates price declines in the transport, recreation and culture, and hotels and restaurants categories. By contrast, underlying inflation, which excludes the most extreme price changes, increased in 11 UK regions, with only London recording a reduction in underlying inflation. The broad-based increase in underlying inflation led to a 0.2 percentage point increase in the national figure, to 1.2 per cent in May. This is the third month of increase in underlying inflation and for that reason our forecast suggests headline CPI inflation above 2 per cent in the 12 months to May 2021.
The merits of investing in private versus public equity have generated considerable debate, often fueled by concerns about data quality. In this paper, we use
The Canadian government is considering a shift to longer-term borrowing to finance its ballooning budget deficit, a strategy that has the potential to complicate matters for companies raising money in the country’s bond markets.
The central banking strategy known as "yield curve control" has helped the Bank of Japan set long-term interest rates with less need to intervene in markets, though it has yet to prove itself in boosting inflation, two top New York Federal Reserve Bank officials wrote on Monday.
Crises can drive change, but sometimes it takes two crises to cement a transformation. Alone, the Great Depression ushered in the New Deal, roughly tripling U.S. federal spending as a share of output. But it took World War II to push federal spending much higher, solidifying the role of the state in the U.S. economy. If federal interventions such as the creation of the interstate highway system felt natural by the mid-1950s, it was the result of two compounding shocks, not a single one.
My proposal to fund the US with perpetuities comes from a paper, here. (Sorry regular readers for the repeated plug.) The rest is standard fiscal theory of the price level, spread over too many papers to give one more plug.
The banks are due to use about €765bn of the ultra-cheap loans to repay earlier ECB loans that are about to mature. But they are expected to use much of the remaining €543bn to buy bonds issued by their own governments — earning them an instant profit on the “carry trade” between the negative rate from the ECB and the higher yield on government bonds.
An increasing share of total university and college enrolments have come from international sources in recent years. During the 2017/2018 academic year, 14.7% and 13.2% of all university and college enrolments were international, respectively. Given the ongoing uncertainties around the COVID-19 pandemic and the new public health restrictions imposed on international travel, physical distancing guidelines affecting classroom structures, and the real possibility that many programs may have to be delivered online, the share of enrolments in various academic programs that are international is of high relevance at the moment.