Tag Archives: Debt

Over at the web site of the Calgary Homeless Foundation, I’ve written a review of the recent Alberta budget. Points I make in the blog post include the following: -Alberta remains the lowest-taxed province in Canada. -Alberta’s net debt-to-GDP ratio remains the lowest in Canada. -For the third consecutive year, the Rachel Notley government announced a tuition freeze for (domestic) post-secondary students. -No major changes were announced to social assistance benefit levels. Thus, a “single...

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2016 has been an extraordinary year. Memorable for so many things: celebrity deaths, the melting of Arctic sea ice, Trump, Brexit, terror attacks in Europe, drownings in the Med, destruction in Syria. The largest movement of people in recorded history. And - perhaps - the overturning of the political & economic paradigm established by Reagan and Thatcher. Are we seeing the end of elites and the triumph of the common man? Was the Brexit vote really the victory of "ordinary people"? Was...

Global trade is awful. Really, it is. For the last five years, trade volumes have been growing at their slowest sustained rate since the early 1980s. Here's a horrible chart from the World Trade Organisation's latest forecast: And in the last year, things have got worse: Import demand of developing economies fell 3.2% in Q1 before staging a partial recovery of 1.5% in Q2.  Meanwhile, developed economies recorded positive import growth of 0.8% in Q1 and negative growth of -0.8% in Q2....

I bet you've never heard of Slovenia. It's the northernmost Balkan state, squeezed between Austria, Italy and Croatia on the Adriatic coast. It's small, peaceful (by Balkan standards) and prosperous compared to the rest of the Balkans, though that isn't saying much. It is also stunningly beautiful, in a mountains-and-lakes sort of way. It is in many ways rather like Austria.But at the moment, Slovenia is famous not for its lovely scenery, or its important history, or its rich culture. No,...

The Governor of the Bank of England's opening remarks at the release of today's Financial Stability Report were stark: At its March meeting, the FPC judged that “the risks around the referendum [were] the most significant near-term domestic risks to financial stability.” Some of those risks have begun to crystallise. The Governor was admirably calm and balanced in his press conference. But nevertheless there was a degree of schadenfreude about his remarks. Prior to the referendum, the Bank...

John Oliver's story on debt collection is very instructive. It looks only at the domestic practices, but these are essentially the same as the ones used by Vulture Funds in international financial markets. [embedded content] So respectable businessmen like Paul Singer, a top GPO contributor that owns the Elliot Vulture Fund that buys debt of developing countries and sues them in New York courts, or the international organizations like the IMF that impose conditionality on poor indebted...

Should Greece leave the Euro? That was the title of the Oxford debate at the Prague Summit in which I had the pleasure of participating yesterday.But this is the wrong question. Unless there is a considerable shift in Eurozone politics, Greece WILL leave the Euro - eventually. The question is when, and how.To see this, we need to look at the motivations of all the players involved in the negotiations. The Greek negotiations resemble a "prisoner's dilemma", in which the best outcome for...