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Stephen Gordon Profile picture
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16 Jun, 5 tweets, 1 min read
Lemme tell you about a little something we call the "Bank of Canada"
Inflation is a monetary phenomenon, and the Bank of Canada controls monetary policy. It has a mandate to target inflation at 2%, with a margin of error of +/- on percentage point. 2/
It's not unusual for temporary price spikes in volatile sectors to drive CPI inflation outside the 1%-3% interval. A few months ago, we were under 1%, now a bit over 3%, These things happen
Again, controlling inflation is the Bank of Canada's job, not the federal government's. If you really think that the Bank is screwing up and that it should raise interest rates, then you can make that case. And then watch it get shot down.
I can't believe I'm explaining this. Conservatives used to know these things. /fin

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More from @stephenfgordon

Stephen Gordon Profile picture
21 Mar
The binding constraint on the rate of vaccination in Canada right now is supply: provinces are sitting on an inventory of 2-5 days' worth of vaccines.

It's very, vary hard to argue that the provinces could or should push that even lower. 1/
If you haven't already guessed, mass vaccination is a massive administrative undertaking. And in order for the bureaucracy to function properly, it needs to be able to plan on a steady roll-out. 2/
Staffing vaccination clinics is not a matter of calling up Manpower and saying "We need 150 people to administer vaccines today and another 150 people to handle the paperwork and crowd control". 3/
Read 6 tweets
Stephen Gordon Profile picture
19 Mar
You know, I wonder to what extent the CPC's current problems are due to that fact that the Liberals have eaten their lunch when it comes to economics.
I mean, it wasn't so long ago that someone who thought that free trade was a good thing or that increasing corporate taxes was at best a problematic thing had only one choice: the Conservatives. 2/
The current incarnation of tle Liberals has removed those easy targets, and has more or less embraced the lessons of the Economist Party. 3/
Read 5 tweets
Stephen Gordon Profile picture
27 Jul 20
I'll be writing this all up in the context of a forthcoming paper, but since the charts are ready, I'll post them now without comment for the benefit of the sort of people who are tuned into Sunday Night Twitter. 1/
Personal income tax revenues in OECD countries, as a share of GDP and as a share of the total: 2/
(Yes, yes, I know: what's going on with Denmark? I\ll have an answer for that as well) 3/
Read 7 tweets
Stephen Gordon Profile picture
21 May 20
A thread that would have been a column, if I were still writing columns:

Recessions have always been about men. Men have always borne the brunt of job losses, and male-dominated industries are the focus of standard stimulus packages. 1/
And the economics field that informs discussion about how to react to recessions - macroeconomics - is more heavily represented by men than pretty much every other specialty.

Maybe this follows from the first point; I don't know. 2/
But this is different. Women have seen their jobs/hours disappear more than men have, and they are harder hit by the extra (unpaid) burden of taking care of children that had been at school or daycare. 3/
Read 6 tweets
Stephen Gordon Profile picture
24 Mar 20
The more I think of it, the more I think that WWII comparisons *understate* the gravity of the current crisis. The economic challenge then was figuring out how 85% of the labour force could keep the other 15% in the military fed and supplied. We are facing much, MUCH worse. 1/
The people fighting the war on covid-19 are those removed from the labour force and forced to stay home. Our challenge is to sustain them, just as we had to keep soldiers sustained during WWII. But instead of 15% of the labour force then, it will be at least 30% or more now. 2/
The only saving grace is that we're pretty sure that the current war won't take 6 years to fight. But we're looking at a scale of economic disruption that is several multiples of what we experienced during the Second World War. 3/
Read 5 tweets
Stephen Gordon Profile picture
23 Nov 19
Okay, we're all having fun with this, and I'm pretty sure that Mme Fortier thought that it was a lighthearted deflection of a question she can't or won't answer.

But it's another indication of how upper-middle-class people mistake themselves for the middle class 1/
Hockey is expensive: theglobeandmail.com/news/national/…

People with median incomes have to squeeze themselves dry to pay for a kid in hockey; it's a sport for the upper-middle-class. 2/
Add this to the so-called "Middle-Class Tax Cut" (which most benefited the top decile of the income distribution, and helped the median not at all), and you have a government who talks about the middle class, but talks to the upper-middle-class. 3/
Read 4 tweets

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