Inflation | General financial discussion | Discussion forum

The members here are doing their part to fight inflation by pushing for higher deposit rates. We should get a thank you from the B of C.

Loonie said
As far as I know, the problem is global, and Mr Macklem is not in charge of managing European inflation control. Canada is, so far, doing better than these European countries.

None of us is happy about this, but changing the governor of the BoC is not going to make much difference, and it's naive at best to think so.
It would be more useful to fire Putin, but that is not in our power.  

I was joking...

The problem has both global and local aspects. Continuing with QE even after inflation went up, “free money for everyone” even after the need has passed are the kinds of things that we did to ourselves and BoC played an important role.

While Mr Putin played a role in creating oil shortages, he wouldn’t have been a problem had we not stopped producing engineers for the oil and gas industry and killed infrastructure projects.

Certainly Canada and our monetary and fiscal policy mistakes aren’t unique by any means, and what others do impacts us but it does not mean there were no harmful errors.

Europe made a massive error by making themselves hooked on Russian gas, so they are paying for it now. That shouldn’t have been an issue in a country like Canada.

Are you referring to NDP? They are propping up the government. CPC are not adding anything because they are not in the government.

Back to BoC, this Prof thinks that it was too late to start tightening but should stop now

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/opinion-bank-canada-now-pause-142714584.html

I am not so sure; just because we are going to get a lot of further inflationary pressure and the risk of high inflation becoming the norm is associated with higher consequences than a recession.

Sorry need to jump in here also. We do have some home grown issues. BOC allowed the government to run record Defecits at a time when we had the best employment numbers in the history of the country. This never should have happened, you spend to put a floor under a spiralling downward economy. BOC could have started raising rates plenty earlier with small 0.25 raises to let the government know there would be a cost to this. But they look bought and paid for the BOC do. I had sent letters to my Liberal MP many months before January 2022 stating in our factory of 1000 we had zero labour and zero people applying for our factory floor jobs that routinely pay 60-80k with OT. We had to raise starting rates $3 an hour just to get a few people applying. Under staffed for 12 months min. This was all known by our governments that continued Defecits spending creating jobs when they didn’t need to and competing for resources that were scarce. They helped drive inflation, they helped drive our cost structures permanently higher, we will raise prices further. These are home grown issues but all I got was snickering and snide remarks from my liberal MP believing I’m just a conservative slime ball and defended the free doles of money they put out “to support Canadians where they needed it most” and they apparently didn’t need the 80k 100 jobs we took 1.5 yrs to fill. THIS IS THE HOME grown inflation.

BTW- with each raise in carbon taxation our company will raise prices again to maintain margins. More home grown built in inflation

Those of us who suspected that inflation was NOT transitory when it first started to jump were in the minority - and the doghouse.
Most economists thought that way at the time and it would have been strange indeed (and perhaps cost them their jobs) if BoC had pronounced otherwise.

I believed then, and still do, that economics, as a field on inquiry has too narrow a vision of the world and an astonishing level of reliance on theories and models. I have studied many subjects but have never seen one as ridden with theories, treated with reverence as if undeniably true, as this one. This is a weakness in any field, but particularly glaring in economics for some reason. In other fields, we may say "so-and-so proved X in their study of ABC in 2015" etc., but in economics they say "thus-and-so is true because of the theory of XYZ. Facts can be disproven too, with further investigation, but such dependence on theory is beyond my credulity threshold.

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October Inflation Rates For Each Povince . . .

➡ https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/here-s-a-list-october-inflation-rates-for-canadian-provinces-1.1847297

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Dean