Posted on 01/29/2015 9:09:37 AM PST by george76
Sometimes it looks like the Canadian economy is unraveling like a giant surprise package right in the face of economists and the Bank of Canada. We’ve got big data revisions, shock bank rate cuts, a falling Canadian dollar. Through it all, nobody saw it coming. They didn’t see a thing.
Statistics Canada’s labour force data are notoriously wonky and revision prone. Still, Wednesday’s revamp wiped out 50,000 jobs that economists had assumed had been created during 2014. In an economy with almost 20 million employed, the revisions are small, but they cast doubt on the state of the economy and the outlook for 2015. Institutional economists who did not see it coming now see the labour data as a sure sign the Bank of Canada will lower interest rates again in March.
Down in the U.S., meanwhile, the Federal Reserve bubbled with optimism. It said economic activity has been “expanding at a solid pace” with “strong job gains and a lower unemployment rate.” Best of all, “business fixed investment is advancing,” the Fed said in a statement Wednesday. Some economists say the Fed may raise interest rates later in the year.
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Canada was settling in to a new world of high oil prices, and the outcome did indeed seem unambiguously good. But then came the change in oil prices that nobody saw coming.
(Excerpt) Read more at business.financialpost.com ...
Yeah, they tried. I dont understand it either. They should have hired the Wal Mart canada guy who understood logistics and suppliers up north.
Wow. Very informative. Thank you!
I made a typo on a date in the above post. It was January 2014 not 2015 when I first heard Saudi Prince Alwaleed go nuts about the surging US Oil Production:
“Saudi Arabia’s Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal, a billionaire businessman and nephew of Saudi King Abdullah, said the production of shale oil and natural gas in the United States and other countries, primarily done through fracking, is a real competitive threat to “any oil-producing country in the world,” adding that Saudi Arabia must address the issue because it is a “matter of survival.””
With domestic oil production increasing month over month and the Saudi Prince getting really nervous it wasn’t difficult at all to see what was coming.
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