CHARLEBOIS: 'Greedflation' campaign needs to end - "Most of the recommendations urge Parliament to prioritize efficiency throughout the supply chain. This entails supporting farmers, acknowledging the support needed by indigenous communities, particularly in Northern regions, establishing reciprocal standards for imported products, and eliminating best-before dates. Although diverse in nature, these recommendations highlight the dire need for a comprehensive food policy in Canada. The investigation conducted by the committee simply reinforced what was already known. Of utmost importance, the Committee advises the government to fortify the Competition Bureau’s mandate and enable effective competition oversight within the Canadian grocery sector. This entails addressing “black-out” periods when grocers implicitly freeze wholesale prices, revenue-sharing mechanisms, and barriers to entry for external players. This aspect emerges as the report’s most critical component. Among the 13 recommendations, two stand out prominently. The first is recommendation No. 1, which proposes that the Government of Canada should undertake necessary measures to gather and publicly disclose data on costs throughout the entire agri-food supply chain in Canada. This includes acquiring detailed cost data from sectors such as primary agriculture, food and beverage processing, and food retail. The underlying intention of this recommendation is to provide increased transparency to the public, which seeks answers and clarity. However, transparency, when taken to extremes, can present challenges. Implementing such a system, encompassing thousands of products, would prove arduous, and ensuring data accuracy would pose a significant challenge. Companies disclosing their true costs may encounter a competitive disadvantage compared to those opting not to disclose accurate data. Ottawa would need to employ a substantial team of auditors to verify the validity of the data. Companies would also need to increase costs by hiring more personnel solely for compliance purposes, thereby potentially leading to increased food prices. Full cost disclosure may necessitate revealing sensitive information, including proprietary formulas, supplier contracts, or manufacturing processes. Consequently, companies and investors might choose to withdraw from such a market. Additionally, it could grant unfair advantages to foreign companies that are not obligated to disclose unless their operations are based in Canada. Paradoxically, cost disclosure could potentially result in collusion or anti-competitive behavior among companies. If all companies have access to detailed cost information, there is a risk of coordinated pricing strategies or practices that impede competition, ultimately limiting consumer choice and market dynamics, which should be avoided. The second noteworthy recommendation is recommendation No. 9, proposing that the Government of Canada explore the possibility of implementing a windfall profits tax if the upcoming study conducted by the Competition Bureau reveals instances of abuse by grocers. It is crucial to note that the Competition Bureau’s study was never intended to evaluate greed within the system. Additionally, a windfall tax would discourage competition over time, representing a short-term solution that could detrimentally affect our food autonomy as a nation. Ultimately, the task of measuring greed proves to be exceedingly challenging. Attempting to delineate an acceptable threshold for profitability becomes an exercise in futility."
Europeans Are Becoming Poorer. ‘Yes, We’re All Worse Off.’ - WSJ - "The French are eating less foie gras and drinking less red wine. Spaniards are stinting on olive oil. Finns are being urged to use saunas on windy days when energy is less expensive. Across Germany, meat and milk consumption has fallen to the lowest level in three decades and the once-booming market for organic food has tanked. Italy’s economic development minister, Adolfo Urso, convened a crisis meeting in May over prices for pasta, the country’s favorite staple, after they jumped by more than double the national inflation rate. With consumption spending in free fall, Europe tipped into recession at the start of the year, reinforcing a sense of relative economic, political and military decline that kicked in at the start of the century. Europe’s current predicament has been long in the making. An aging population with a preference for free time and job security over earnings ushered in years of lackluster economic and productivity growth. Then came the one-two punch of the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s protracted war in Ukraine. By upending global supply chains and sending the prices of energy and food rocketing, the crises aggravated ailments that had been festering for decades. Governments’ responses only compounded the problem. To preserve jobs, they steered their subsidies primarily to employers, leaving consumers without a cash cushion when the price shock came. Americans, by contrast, benefited from inexpensive energy and government aid directed primarily at citizens to keep them spending. In the past, the continent’s formidable export industry might have come to the rescue. But a sluggish recovery in China, a critical market for Europe, is undermining that growth pillar. High energy costs and rampant inflation at a level not seen since the 1970s are dulling manufacturers’ price advantage in international markets and smashing the continent’s once-harmonious labor relations. As global trade cools, Europe’s heavy reliance on exports—which account for about 50% of eurozone GDP versus 10% for the U.S.—is becoming a weakness... Adjusted for inflation and purchasing power, wages have declined by about 3% since 2019 in Germany, by 3.5% in Italy and Spain and by 6% in Greece. Real wages in the U.S. have increased by about 6% over the same period, according to OECD data. The pain reaches far into the middle classes. In Brussels, one of Europe’s richest cities, teachers and nurses stood in line on a recent evening to collect half-price groceries from the back of a truck. The vendor, Happy Hours Market, collects food close to its expiration date from supermarkets and advertises it through an app. Customers can order in the early afternoon and collect their cut-price groceries in the evening. “Some customers tell me, because of you I can eat meat two or three times per week,” said Pierre van Hede, who was handing out crates of groceries... Spending on high-end groceries has collapsed. Germans consumed 52 kilograms of meat per person in 2022, about 8% less than the previous year and the lowest level since calculations began in 1989. While some of that reflects societal concerns about healthy eating and animal welfare, experts say the trend has been accelerated by meat prices which increased by up to 30% in recent months. Germans are also swapping meats such as beef and veal for less-expensive ones such as poultry, according to the Federal Information Center for Agriculture... On the Mediterranean island of Mallorca, businesses are lobbying for more flights to the U.S. to increase the number of free-spending American tourists, said Maria Frontera, president of the Mallorca Chamber of Commerce’s tourism commission. Americans spend about €260 ($292) per day on average on hotels compared with less than €180 ($202) for Europeans... Weak growth and rising interest rates are straining Europe’s generous welfare states, which provide popular healthcare services and pensions. European governments find the old recipes for fixing the problem are either becoming unaffordable or have stopped working. Three-quarters of a trillion euros in subsidies, tax breaks and other forms of relief have gone to consumers and businesses to offset higher energy costs—something economists say is now itself fueling inflation, defeating the subsidies’ purpose. Public-spending cuts after the global financial crisis starved Europe’s state-funded healthcare systems, especially the U.K.’s National Health Service... Some colleagues turned off their heating entirely over recent months, worried they wouldn’t be able to afford sharply higher costs, he said. Noa Cohen, a 28-year old public-affairs specialist in London, says she could quadruple her salary in the same job by leveraging her U.S. passport to move across the Atlantic. Cohen recently got a 10% pay raise after switching jobs, but the increase was completely swallowed by inflation. She says friends are freezing their eggs because they can’t afford children anytime soon, in the hope that they have enough money in future... With European governments needing to increase defense spending and given rising borrowing costs, economists expect taxes to increase, adding pressure on consumers. Taxes in Europe are already high relative to those in other wealthy countries, equivalent to around 40-45% of GDP compared with 27% in the U.S. American workers take home almost three-quarters of their paychecks, including income taxes and Social Security taxes, while French and German workers keep just half. The pauperization of Europe has bolstered the ranks of labor unions, which are picking up tens of thousands of members across the continent, reversing a decadeslong decline. Higher unionization may not translate into fuller pockets for members. That’s because many are pushing workers’ preference for more free time over higher pay, even in a world of spiraling skills shortages... Almost half of employees in Germany’s health industry choose to work around 30 hours per week rather than full time, reflecting tough working conditions"
Clearly, they need to do more to combat climate change
This is wild. The GDP of the Eurozone was about the same as the US in 2008, but now the US is about twice as big (at current prices). De-growth is clearly working! Even at PPP, in 2008 the US had 24% more GDP than the Eurozone. Now its GDP is 31% more
Here Are the Main Tools for Fighting Inflation - "When the Fed raises interest rates, mortgages and business loans become more expensive. This dampens prices but also economic activity. It’s clear that the Fed can eliminate inflation—as it did under Paul Volcker in the 1980s—but with the potential cost of a (possibly severe) recession. The consensus high-level view, then, is that the Fed ought to only counterbalance excess demand, while ignoring temporary supply side shocks... on the fiscal policy side, reducing spending and/or raising taxes can reduce aggregate demand and thereby bring inflation under control. Sen. Joe Manchin’s proposed revision of the Build Back Better bill, which would include more new revenue than spending, could have that effect. But not all actions in this area require congressional action. The Biden administration could, for example, reduce Medicaid spending by ending the public health emergency and the additional transfers to states that come with it. The administration could also end the moratorium on student loan payments, which in addition to reducing demand would have attractive distributional implications. It could also work to reclaim some of the excess funds transferred to state and local governments, to keep those levels of government from contributing to additional inflationary pressures. Using fiscal policy to reduce excess aggregate demand has some clear advantages over using monetary policy. Policymakers have much more nuanced tools than the Fed’s blunt instruments. This is important because any economic demand-dampening could have major distributional consequences. The political branches are subject to more direct democratic accountability and control than the Fed, and are therefore better suited to deciding where the pain will fall. Also, using fiscal policy limits the extent to which the Federal Reserve will have to raise interest rates. This is attractive not just for political reasons (the stock market!) but also from a fiscal-sustainability perspective. If interest rates do not have to rise as much thanks to fiscal tightening, the federal government will not see interest payments on its debt rise as fast. This may sound like a minor issue, but federal debt held by the public is now around 100 percent of GDP, and every percentage point of interest-rate increases corresponds to a percentage point of GDP in additional spending, or over 5 percent of federal revenue. Of course, the best solution is to limit the extent of dampening required. Again, whatever the cause of our current inflation woes, the ideal solution is not for aggregate demand to shrink but for aggregate supply to catch up. While the Fed cannot realistically expand aggregate supply, the administration should make that an urgent goal. Which brings us to regulatory policy. A great place to start expanding supply would be addressing inefficient regulation. Unfortunately, President Biden’s proposals in this area have been lackluster. In his State of the Union address he proposed four anti-inflation measures: price controls for prescription drugs; subsidies for weatherization and electric vehicles; subsidies for childcare; subsidies for home and long-term care; housing subsidies; and subsidies for pre-K. Even setting the fiscal impact aside, what these measures will mostly do is drive up demand, and with that, pre-subsidy prices for a broad range of services. Unfortunately, the president mostly doubled down"
From 2022
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Fall in inflation fails to materialise - "‘The difficulty for the Bank of England… they have to therefore, create a recession. They have to create uncertainty and frailty. Because, it's only when companies feel nervous about the future that they will think, well, maybe I won't put through that price rise. Or workers when they're a little bit less confident about their job, think, well, I won't push my boss for that higher pay. It's that weakness in activity which eventually gets rid of inflation’"
Canada's inflation rate slows to 3.4%, lowest level in almost 2 years - "Frances Donald, global chief economist with Manulife Investment Management says valid arguments can be made for and against more rate hikes based on Tuesday's inflation data, but either way central bankers are facing a conundrum they've never faced before: is it even worth getting back to their inflation target in the first place? "The Bank of Canada … has to ask itself what is the cost of further rate hikes?" she said in an interview. "We may need to question is it worth trying to get inflation down to two per cent … if it just creates recessions and slow growth and keeps people out of jobs." While rate hikes have clearly had a negative impact on the housing market, they don't appear to be doing much to bring down the cost of living in every other part of the economy, Donald said, noting that food prices, for example, are rising sometimes due to factors outside our control. "Trying to use interest rate hikes to bring them down or solve these headline consumer price index questions is not going to work," she said. "There's a large disease that's decimating orange crops in Florida and raising the cost of oranges. [Are] interest rate hikes from the Bank of Canada going to change that? Not at all.""
A cost-of-living crisis made by our elites - "Britain is in a serious crisis. And while Russia’s shock invasion of Ukraine may have sparked this crisis, the rot had set in long before. Worse, this rot is not a product of random chance or neglect. It is largely down to decisions made by our governing elites over the past few decades, which dealt blow after blow to our economy, energy security and the soundness of our money. And pretty much all of these decisions were supported by a consensus among technocrats, experts and politicians. Before the invasion of Ukraine, another profound shock to the economy came from Covid-19 – and, more pertinently, how we chose to respond to it... Yet even as the UK endured its largest fall in output in the history of industrial capitalism, politicians and experts assured us this was either nothing to worry about or that the medicine was strictly necessary. We were told that economies would open up again, supply chains would come back online, and any disruption or price rises that followed would be merely ‘transitory’ and would quickly dissipate. By the end of 2021, the experts were still sanguine about an economic recovery to come, even as they demanded new ‘curbs on daily life’ to deal with the milder Omicron variant of Covid. ‘“Build Back Better” is not a hollow slogan, but the most likely outcome’, the FT’s top economist assured us last December. Among the elites, a fantasy took hold that we would escape lockdown relatively unscathed. The pain would be anaesthetised by ultra-loose fiscal and monetary policy... Energy is arguably where the most serious self-harm has been committed. Runaway prices are causing misery to households, while industry could be facing a winter of blackouts. It should be obvious to all that advanced industrial societies need cheap, abundant and secure supplies of energy, whether there is a crisis or not. But our elites have traded all this in for green virtue-signalling. This is why only a year ago a cabinet minister was happy to be filmed celebrating the demolition of a power plant. It is why successive governments have blocked new and cheap ways to access much-needed gas. It is why they have tried to hamper investment in domestic oil production. And it is why they have promoted unreliable and intermittent renewables above all other sources of energy. After more than a decade of neglect and managed decline, our energy supplies are simply too fragile to absorb a shock the size of the Ukraine war. Again, the consensus across the elites here has been rock solid... All of these policies – from lockdown to money-printing to Net Zero extremism – are made a thousand times worse by the complacency and short-termism that has defined politics for so long. A recently revived viral video of former deputy PM Nick Clegg seems to sum up this problem. Filmed in 2010, he dismisses the prospect of expanding nuclear power, because new power plants wouldn’t come on line ‘until 2021 or 2022’. And while Clegg seemed perturbed by having to think a decade ahead, today’s political pygmies can barely think a few months ahead. None of them has any real idea how to steer us out of this crisis, let alone build the foundations for a robust and enduring recovery. Our leaders have been gripped by an End of History stupor that convinced them that European wars, energy shocks and inflation had all been banished to the history books. Perhaps this is why they thought nothing of running down our energy system, of locking down the nation or of printing money like there was no tomorrow. The disastrous consequences should have been obvious to them all. Yet in each instance, critical thinking has given way to conformism."
McDonald' Says Fewer People Are Ordering Fries With Their Burgers
No ‘greed-flation,’ fed gov’t finds no 'profiteering' despite high inflation - "According to a statement from the Bank of Canada, there is no evidence to suggest retailers and wholesalers are engaging in profiteering due to inflation. The research findings showed companies are adjusting prices to reflect higher costs, without any indication of profiteering... During his testimony on Sept. 27 at the Senate Banking committee, Parliamentary Budget Officer Yves Giroux stated he found no evidence to support the claim that retailers and wholesalers were taking advantage of price increases... “But I’m an economist by training. As far as I’m concerned, this is a matter of supply and demand. It’s hard to accuse anyone increasing their prices of profiting from the situation even though it may look that way.” New Democrat MPs accused wholesalers and retailers of profiteering. “We are experiencing greed-flation,” NDP leader Jagmeet Singh told the Commons last September 22. “No one else wants to talk about that.” During their testimonies at the Commons Agriculture committee, grocers denied allegations of profiteering. Executives stated margins on retail food sales remained steady at 3% to 4%."
Jack Mintz: Sorry, Mr. Singh: Inflation-adjust food profits and gouging disappears - "It isn’t surprising that NDP leader Jagmeet Singh would argue food inflation is due to price gouging by grocery companies. His business is politics after all, not a truth-finding mission. What was surprising was the weak response of grocery CEOs before a parliamentary committee last month: they seemed ill-prepared to deal with the accusation they were profiting from high food inflation. Singh backs his claim by citing a Dalhousie academic paper by Samantha Taylor and Sylvain Charlebois, who compared 2022’s first-half profit margins with the average of the previous five years. They estimated that Empire/Sobeys, Metro and Loblaw made almost an annualized $1 billion in excess gross profits, with almost 90 per cent belonging to Loblaw. Because the five-year averages included some weak years, the paper also compared the 2022 numbers with the most profitable of the previous five years. Using that estimate, excess profitability drops to $260 million. Loblaw’s “profiteering” is estimated to be $1 million per day while the other two firms were actually negative. This led Singh to accuse Loblaw’s CEO Galen Weston of reaping high profits while Canadians struggle putting food on the table. All this makes good politics, but Dalhousie’s analysis is deeply flawed. The reason? To compare book profits of different years with quite different inflation rates is a definite “no-no.” Canada’s food inflation averaged roughly two per cent per year from 2017 to 2021 but then jumped to almost 10 per cent in 2022. To be compared across years, profits need to be adjusted for the effects of inflation. No doubt it reflects my age, but that’s one of the first things that comes to my mind when inflation surges. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, experts spent considerable time correcting book profits for inflation. Several countries still make that adjustment for corporate tax purposes, including Argentina, Chile and Mexico... Three corrections are involved. First, book depreciation and amortization expenditures have to be re-stated to reflect replacement rather than historical asset prices. Second, the cost of goods sold is also revised upwards so that older products taken out of inventory are again valued according to replacement cost, not historical cost. Third, net interest expense is adjusted downwards to account for inflation eroding the purchasing power of unindexed bonds held by lenders. For most non-financial companies, making all three adjustments reduces book profits in net terms... Loblaw’s inflation-adjusted profit margin in 2022 rose 0.5 cents to 3.2 cents but far less than that estimated by the Dalhousie paper (about $200 million in food sales rather than $1 billion). The half-cent increase in Loblaw’s margin therefore explains only 1/20th of the 10 per cent increase in food prices in 2022. Price gouging is not the problem."
More competition can help keep ‘grocery prices in check,’ report argues - "Most Canadians buy groceries in stores owned by a handful of grocery giants, with Canada’s three largest grocers — Loblaws, Sobeys and Metro — collectively reporting more than $100 billion in sales and $3.6 billion in profits last year, the study found. The Competition Bureau’s investigation sought to find out to what extent high levels of concentration in Canada’s grocery industry was contributing to soaring levels of food inflation — a trend that continues to cause pain on Canadian household budgets. The latest annual inflation reading from Statistics Canada Tuesday showed that while overall inflation had cooled to 3.4 per cent in May, grocery prices remain elevated at 9.0 per cent last month... The Competition Bureau report offered new insights into grocers’ food margins, showing “modest yet meaningful” growth since 2017. The average one to two percentage points added to grocers’ margins works out to an extra $1-2 per $100 spent by Canadians at the grocery store, per the report. The agency noted that the growth trend in grocers’ food margins had been underway since before the pandemic and the latest bout of high inflation, which many economists have tied to supply chain disruptions and severe weather impacts. The grocer sector is typically a low-margin industry, the Bureau noted, which gives even small increases in a company’s food margins an outsized impact on overall profits. A highly competitive grocery industry would not see margins rise easily, the report argues, as stores would find incentives to trim their margins to compete with other grocers... The independent consumer watchdog recommends all levels of government encourage the entry of new homegrown grocers into the market and seek ways to lure international brands to the country. The report also includes recommendations to standardize packaging units and to limit property controls used to prevent new grocers from opening up shop."
Time for more regulation, which will encourage new, small players to enter the market!
Grocery giants are screwing Canadians—and farmers have proof - "The National Farmers Union (NFU) has submitted data to the House of Commons agriculture committee which details how much retail food prices have risen compared to the prices that farmers receive for their goods. In fact, the union says retail prices have been completely “decoupled” from corresponding food inputs."
When you don't understand companies have more than one type of cost
Opinion | Politics is trumping economics. It might end badly. - The Washington Post - "by the early 2000s, countries were congratulating themselves for having won the war. It all seemed part of a paradigm in which governments recognized the power of free markets and free trade. Thomas Friedman used the metaphor of the “golden straitjacket” to explain what happened. Governments placed themselves in a situation where their policy options were tightly constrained by markets, and as a result, their politics shrank but their economies grew. Over the past few years, it has seemed as if the opposite is happening almost everywhere. Look at Turkey, which by the 2000s had become a model developing country, taming inflation and spurring growth. Its policymakers were lauded across the world. Today, Turkey’s president has abandoned even the pretense of rational economic policy, using policy to reward friends and punish foes and advocating monetary policy that is the opposite of what most experts believe would work. Chile, which was considered the most fiscally prudent country in Latin America, now appears to have taken a path toward a more familiar left-wing populism. Or consider the poster child of developing countries, China, where economic growth was the north star of policymaking. Today, President Xi Jinping pursues policies that often attack the private sector in key growth areas such as technology. As scholar Elizabeth Economy has pointed out, it is China, not the United States, that began the move to decouple the two economies and embraced protectionism and economic nationalism when Xi announced his “Made in China” strategy. India, for its part, has mirrored this with its own protectionism and subsidies. The Western world has followed suit. Driven by an understandable concern about middle-class wages and inequality, economic policy is no longer oriented toward growth. Tariffs, subsidies and relief packages all reflect the fact that politics has trumped economics. Central banks everywhere have rushed in over the past decade to take extreme measures in response to the two big shocks of the age — the financial crisis and the pandemic. As Ruchir Sharma notes, in the mid-1990s not one country in the world had a ratio of debt to gross domestic product above 300 percent. Today, 25 countries have exceeded this mark. The old obsession with economics over politics was overdone. It achieved great successes but created other problems, such as wage stagnation. But the current emphasis on politics over economics seems more dangerous. It allows politicians to engage in patronage policies, protectionism and short-term gimmicks to prevent ordinary people from feeling the pain of a crisis. In the long run, however, one wonders if it is these same ordinary people who will have to pay the price"
Shrinkflation is getting worse in Canada — and it could mean paying more taxes - "“Be on the shrinkflation lookout. If (an item) is under 500 mL, you will pay taxes. If you love Häagen-Dazs ice cream — and it’s 450 mL — you (have to) pay taxes on that. Same for granola bars. Only five per box — it means it’s a snack. It means it’s taxable. Be careful out there.” Ice cream and similar products, such as frozen yogurt and non-dairy alternatives, are taxable if they’re less than 500 millilitres or 500 grams, and when packaged or sold in single servings (such as ice cream sandwiches and bars). In Charlebois’ granola bar example, that same product packaged in quantities of six or more would be exempt."
Inflation in 2022 will stay high, Larry Summers predicts - "Summers puts the chance of a recession at 75%. “History teaches us that soft landings represent the triumph of hope over experience,” he says. “There are no examples when inflation was above 4% and unemployment was below 4% that the economy achieved a soft landing. We are unlikely to achieve a reduction of inflation to something like the Fed’s target without a significant slowing of the economy.”... Summers frets that the legacy from the trillions in COVID relief spending he was so foresighted in criticizing, “may limit the resources available for the public investment needed for fighting secular stagnation. We’re like a family that borrowed a lot for its vacation rather than to fix its roof or expand its house. We have our debt and only memories of the party we had.” The aftermath of all that recklessness is the big inflation that Summers presciently saw coming."
From September. Of course the covid hystericists don't care about the consequences of their folly
John Ivison: Singh's grasp on economics suggests he's visiting from Planet Moneybags - "On CTV Question Period on the weekend, Singh was quizzed by host Joyce Napier about the need for monetary policy (the central bank) and fiscal policy (the federal government) to work together. The jumbled nonsense verse that followed suggested yes, we need to combat inflation by reversing the bank’s interest rate hikes and by the government putting money back into people’s pockets — a novel approach to the problem of excess demand."
Liberals (small l) keep claiming change is needed and the two main parties need to be jettisoned. But not all change is good
How Inflation Devoured NYC's Last Great Bargain, Cheap Pizza - Bloomberg - "Inflation is ratcheting up the price of pizza in New York City. One man tracked more than 450 purchases over eight years to quantify the troubling trend."
Central banks' obsession with holding down wages has led to banks becoming 'collateral damage in a class war,' says GFC veteran economist - "A leading economist who correctly predicted the Global Financial Crisis back in 2006 has criticized central banks for waging a "class war" in their pursuit to crush inflation with higher interest rates — which has hit the banking sector. In a Substack newsletter titled 'banks as collateral damage in a class war' published Sunday, British economist Ann Pettifor hit out at "the predicted and deplorable outcome of recent decisions by central bankers" who have been hiking interest rates aggressively in the past year. "In other words, their effective preference is for class war over financial stability," she wrote"
Central bankers have to make hard decisions — and sometimes they get it very wrong - "Do you remember way back when central bankers were telling us that inflation was "transitory?" Both the Bank of Canada's Tiff Macklem and Jerome Powell at the Federal Reserve used all their official authority and confidence to assure us... "If you've got a mortgage or if you're considering making a major purchase, or you're a business and you're considering making an investment, you can be confident rates will be low for a long time," Macklem said at a 2020 news conference while announcing rates would remain unchanged at 0.25 per cent. An apology last week from Australia's central bank governor, Philip Lowe, for telling borrowers — around the same time as Macklem's announcement — that rates would not rise till 2024 has prompted calls for Canada's central banker to make an apology of his own. In a world economy awash with uncertainty, comments from central bankers are often taken as a stable anchor point. But anyone who actually takes time to take another listen to those statements through the years, all preserved on the Bank of Canada's website back to 1995, knows the bank doesn't have a secret way of seeing the future."
"Trust the experts"
