Tag Archives: Interest rates

Posted by Nick Falvo under BC, bubble, cities, economic thought, foreign investment/ownership, globalization, housing, inequality, interest rates, investment, Liberal Party policy, monetary policy, municipalities, Ontario, party politics, prices, private equity, regulation, Role of government, taxation, Toronto, wealth. September 25th, 2019Comments: none I’ve written a blog post about the Trudeau Liberals’ recently-proposed speculation tax on residential real estate owned...

I’ve written a blog post about the Trudeau Liberals’ recently-proposed speculation tax on residential real estate owned by non-resident, non-Canadians. The full blog post can be accessed here. Nick Falvo is a Calgary-based research consultant with a PhD in Public Policy. He has academic affiliation at both Carleton University and Case Western Reserve University, and is Section Editor of the Canadian Review of Social Policy/Revue canadienne de politique sociale. You can...

Interest rates represent cost of borrowing and income from saving. Both are reduced by cutting rates. Since is this is a decrease in price, it is disinflationary, which is opposite to what central bankers assume. Savers receive less income, which would likely have been spent on goods purchases. Lower of the cost of firm investment potentially results in lower goods prices. On the other hand, in deciding on a monetary policy using interest rate setting, central banks assume that lower...

Yield curves have gone mad. Negative yields are everywhere, from AAA-rated government bonds to corporate junk. Most developed countries have inverted yield curves, and a fair few developing countries do too:(chart from worldgovernmentbonds.com)Negative yields and widespread yield curve inversion, particularly though not exclusively on safe assets. To (mis)quote a famous pink blog, this is nuts, but everyone is pretending there will be no crash.Here, for your enjoyment, is an à la carte...

In a recent article for the New Statesman, the economics commentator Grace Blakeley makes an extraordinary claim. Writing about the origins of the IMF, she says: Seventy-five years have passed since these international financial institutions were created in Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in 1944. Back then, delegates sought to tame the power of international finance, the growth of which helped to cause the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the ensuing Great Depression. JM Keynes – who led the...

This post was originally published on Pieria in December 2013. Since then, the idea that the long-term real equilibrium interest rate must be equal to or lower than the long-term sustainable growth rate has become much more mainstream. I am just amazed that anyone ever thought it could be otherwise. A long-term real interest rate persistently above the sustainable growth rate cannot possibly be an "equilibrium" rate. As I show in this piece, it can only be maintained through rising...

The following is an interview with Yena Yoon – a financial journalist with Chosen Ilbo “the largest newspaper in South Korea” conducted on 12 February, 2018, but still relevant. What is the most remarkable change in financial market after 2008 global crisis do you see? Why do you think so? The most striking outcome from the global financial crisis of 2007-9 was that there was no structural change to the international financial architecture/system – the system that was at the heart of the...

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A bit wonkish (but no math), but interesting if you are into interest rates and how they affect the economy.Bond Economics No More Neutral Rate?Brian Romanchuk

The dangers of distorting free market interest rates is one of the bits of market folklore that keeps getting passed around. There is actually not a whole lot of data to defend this view; it is best viewed as faith-based reasoning. This topic is particularly interesting in the case of Japan. I am somewhat agnostic on this issue; I do not see particular risks from manipulating the yield curve in the current environment, yet I can see some plausible dangers. This article was triggered by the...