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Fall in Crude Oil Prices Puts USD/CAD on the Rise

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USD/CAD

A mid-October decline in crude oil prices produced a bleaker outlook for the immediate future of the Canadian dollar (CAD), which enabled the US dollar (USD) to get back on the front foot in the USD/CAD currency pair.

On October 15, crude oil prices shed over 3.5% of their value in a single day. The CAD is regarded as one of the world’s leading commodity currencies, such is the Canadian economy’s reliance on the money that it generates from exporting key goods.

Any decline in oil prices is liable to weaken the CAD, which thereby strengthens the USD’s position in comparison to the loonie. That was the case in March 2020, where oil prices plummeted to a four-year low and the USD/CAD rose to its highest level since May 2017.

Neither oil prices nor the USD/CAD currency pair behaved so dramatically in mid-October, but the general trends were the same. Experts have expressed their concerns about the future of oil prices in the coming months, so there may be more scope for the US dollar to make gains against its Canadian counterpart.

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An otherwise strong year for CAD

While the USD’s position as a safe haven has proven reassuring to traders at several junctures throughout the year, the overarching narrative in 2020 for the USD/CAD currency pair is one of Canadian resilience.

USD/CAD rose by approximately 2% on June 12, with that single-day increase the consequence of the US Federal Reserve taking the investing community by surprise with its indication that interest rates would remain low for the next couple of years. That sent markets scrambling, with oil prices also falling to further weaken the CAD’s position.

Yet that was a fleeting moment of strength for the USD, with the CAD swiftly recovering its losses against the greenback. From June 12 to the start of September, the USD/CAD pair slumped by approximately 4.4%.

That saw its June mark of 1.3638 traded for prices in the region of 1.30 as September began. This is an indication of the strength of the CAD, as fewer Canadian dollars were required to purchase one US dollar.

USD/CAD

Source: Pixabay

 

That may not seem like a significant drop, given that the USD/EUR retracted by around 5.5% and the USD/GBP shrunk by around 5.9% in the same time period.

However, the USD/CAD currency pair is not one that is known for its volatility. This can be observed through the margin requirements put in place for forex brokers in Canada. Margin requirements contribute to Canada’s strict regulatory environment for currency trading. The margin requirement determines the percentage of their capital that a trader must put forward to open a new position on a market, with a higher margin percentage necessitating more funds upfront.

The reason that margin requirement is a good indication of a currency pair’s traditional volatility is that the pairs more prone to fluctuations have higher percentages. For example, the notoriously unpredictable pair of the South African rand and the Japanese yen (ZAR/JPY) usually comes with a margin requirement of around 29%, whereas the USD/CAD pair has a much more conservative 2% capital requirement for traders seeking to open up a position.

This makes the stretch between June and September for the USD/CAD currency pair particularly notable. The USD clawed back a small proportion of its losses in September, before almost retreating into the 1.31 region. The USD/CAD had not hovered around the 1.30/1.31 mark since January 2020, a testament to the CAD’s resurgence.

Oil concerns to dampen CAD optimism

The news of crude oil’s price decline gave the USD a platform to bounce back, with the USD/CAD ending October 16 at the 1.3225 level. Further gains are likely to be predicated on the long-term forecast for oil prices, with any bleak outlook for the commodity certain to be bad news for the Canadian dollar and the nation’s wider economy.

Other factors inevitably influence the USD/CAD currency pair, given the countries’ heavy trade links and geographical proximity. As demonstrated by that shift in momentum on June 12, the policies announced by either the Federal Reserve or the Bank of Canada can influence market sentiment.

General politics can also be significant. The last few months of 2020 for the USD/CAD are likely to be shaped by the outcome and immediate aftermath of the US presidential election, although this is not a phenomenon unique to the United States and the Canadian economy.

Markets all over the world will be affected by the victor’s presidential vision for the country, with their new social and fiscal policies having the potential to either instill confidence in the American economy or place the long-term future of the US dollar in jeopardy.

Given the US dollar’s prevalence all over the world, as a peg for some currencies and as the central part of dollarized economies, this promises to be an important close to the year. However, crude oil prices may still prove to be the dominant factor in shaping the USD/CAD currency pair.

USD/CAD

The International Energy Agency’s October report is grim reading for commodity currencies. The IEA calls the outlook ‘fragile’, raising serious concerns about the long-term prospects for growth in oil demand. The IEA anticipates a stock draw of 4 million barrels per day in the fourth quarter of the year, although this statistic should be caveated with the acknowledgement that these figures are coming off the back of record-high levels.

Yet the IEA ends its October report with the declaration that oil producers have little cause for optimism in the long term. At the start of 2020, some experts were predicting that oil prices would not drop below $50 per barrel (bbl) all year. Now, the IEA suggests that the projected curve for oil prices will not reach the $50bbl mark until 2023.

While markets will eventually adapt to these new oil price projections, Canada’s reliance on commodities makes it difficult to foresee any substantial immediate gains for the CAD against the USD. The USD/CAD currency pair may have moved in Canada’s favour for much of the year, but crude oil concerns may provoke momentum in the opposite direction.

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Britain's economy went into recession last year, official figures confirm – The Globe and Mail

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People walk over London Bridge, in London, on Oct. 25, 2023.SUSANNAH IRELAND/Reuters

Britain’s economy entered a shallow recession last year, official figures confirmed on Thursday, leaving Prime Minister Rishi Sunak with a challenge to reassure voters that the economy is safe with him before an election expected later this year.

Gross domestic product shrank by 0.1 per cent in the third quarter and by 0.3 per cent in the fourth, unchanged from preliminary estimates, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) said on Thursday.

The figures will be disappointing for Mr. Sunak, who has been accused by the opposition Labour Party – far ahead in opinion polls – of overseeing “Rishi’s recession.”

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“The weak starting point for GDP this year means calendar-year growth in 2024 is likely to be limited to less than 1 per cent,” said Martin Beck, chief economic adviser at EY ITEM Club.

“However, an acceleration in momentum this year remains on the cards.”

Britain’s economy has shown signs of starting 2024 on a stronger footing, with monthly GDP growth of 0.2 per cent in January, and unofficial surveys suggesting growth continued in February and March.

Tax cuts announced by finance minister Jeremy Hunt and expectations of interest-rate cuts are likely to help the economy in 2024.

However, Britain remains one of the slowest countries to recover from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. At the end of last year, its economy was just 1 per cent bigger than in late 2019, with only Germany faring worse among Group of Seven nations.

The economy grew just 0.1 per cent in all of 2023, its weakest performance since 2009, excluding the peak-pandemic year of 2020.

GDP per person, which has not grown since early 2022, fell by 0.6 per cent in the fourth quarter and 0.7 per cent across 2023.

Sterling was little changed against the dollar and the euro after the data release.

The Bank of England (BOE) has said inflation is moving toward the point where it can start cutting rates. It expects the economy to grow by just 0.25 per cent this year, although official budget forecasters expect a 0.8-per-cent expansion.

BOE policy maker Jonathan Haskel said in an interview reported in Thursday’s Financial Times that rate cuts were “a long way off,” despite dropping his advocacy of a rise at last week’s meeting.

Thursday’s figures from the ONS also showed 0.7 per cent growth in households’ real disposable income, flat in the previous quarter.

Thomas Pugh, an economist at consulting firm RSM, said the increase could prompt consumers to increase their spending and support the economy.

“Consumer confidence has been improving gradually over the last year … as the impact of rising real wages filters through into people’s pockets, even though consumers remain cautious overall,” Mr. Pugh said.

Britain’s current account deficit totalled £21.18-billion ($36.21-billion) in the fourth quarter, slightly narrower than a forecast of £21.4-billion ($36.6-billion) shortfall in a Reuters poll of economists, and equivalent to 3.1 per cent of GDP, up from 2.7 per cent in the third quarter.

The underlying current account deficit, which strips out volatile trade in precious metals, expanded to 3.9 per cent of GDP.

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How will a shrinking population affect the global economy? – Al Jazeera English

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Falling fertility rates could bring about a transformational demographic shift over the next 25 years.

It has been described as a demographic catastrophe.

The Lancet medical journal warns that a majority of countries do not have a high enough fertility rate to sustain their population size by the end of the century.

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The rate of the decline is uneven, with some developing nations seeing a baby boom.

The shift could have far-reaching social and economic impacts.

Enormous population growth since the industrial revolution has put enormous pressure on the planet’s limited resources.

So, how does the drop in births affect the economy?

And regulators in the United States and the European Union crack down on tech monopolies.

The gender gap in tech narrows.

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John Ivison: Canada's economy desperately needs shock treatment after this Liberal government – National Post

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Lack of business investment is the main culprit. Canadians are digging holes with shovels while our competitors are buying excavators

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It speaks to the seriousness of the situation that the Bank of Canada is not so much taking the gloves off as slipping lead into them.

Senior deputy governor, Carolyn Rogers, came as close to wading into the political arena as any senior deputy governor of the central bank probably should in her speech in Halifax this week.

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But she was right to sound the alarm about a subject — Canada’s waning productivity — on which the federal government’s performance has been lacklustre at best.

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Productivity has fallen in six consecutive quarters and is now on a par with where it was seven years ago.

Lack of business investment is the main culprit.

In essence, Canadians are digging holes with shovels while many of our competitors are buying excavators.

“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘in emergency, break glass.’ Well, it’s time to break the glass,” Rogers said.

She was explicit that government policy is partly to blame, pointing out that businesses need more certainty to invest with confidence. Government incentives and regulatory approaches that change year to year do not inspire confidence, she said.

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The government’s most recent contribution to the competitiveness file — Bill C-56, which made a number of competition-related changes — is a case in point. It was aimed at cracking down on “abusive practices” in the grocery industry that no one, including the bank in its own study, has been able to substantiate. Rather than encouraging investment, it added a political actor — the minister of industry — to the market review process. The Business Council of Canada called the move “capricious,” which was Rogers’s point.

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While blatant price-fixing is rare, the lack of investment is a product of the paucity of competition in many sectors, where Canadian companies protected from foreign competition are sitting on fat profit margins and don’t feel compelled to invest to make their operations more efficient. “Competition can make the whole economy more productive,” said Rogers.

The Conservatives now look set to make this an election issue. Ontario MP Ryan Williams has just released a slick 13-minute video that makes clear his party intends to act in this area.

Using the Monopoly board game as a prop, Williams, the party’s critic for pan-Canadian trade and competition, claims that in every sector, monopolies and oligopolies reign supreme, resulting in lower investment, lower productivity, higher prices, worse service, lower wages and more wealth inequality.

(As an aside, it was a marked improvement on last year’s “Justinflation” rap video.)

Williams said that Canadians pay among the highest cell phone prices in the world and that Rogers, Telus and Bell are the priciest carriers, bar none. The claim has some foundation: in a recent Cable.co.uk global league table that compared the average price of one gigabyte, Canada was ranked 216th of 237 countries at US$5.37 (noticeably, the U.S. was ranked even more expensive at US$6).

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Williams noted that two airlines control 80 per cent of the market, even though Air Canada was ranked dead last of all North American airlines for timeliness.

He pointed out that six banks control 87 per cent of Canada’s mortgage market, while five grocery stores — Sobeys, Metro, Loblaw, Walmart and Costco — command a similar dominance of the grocery market.

“Competition is dying in Canada,” Williams said. “The federal government has made things worse by over-regulating airlines, banks and telecoms to actually protect monopolies and keep new players out.”

So far, so good.

The Conservatives will “bring back home a capitalist economy” — a market that does not protect monopolies and creates more competition, in the form of Canadian companies that will provide new supply and better prices.

That sounds great. But at the same time, the Conservative formula for fixing things appears to involve more government intervention, not less.

Williams pointed out the Conservatives opposed RBC buying HSBC’s Canadian operations, WestJet buying Sunwing and Rogers buying Shaw. The party would oppose monopolies from buying up the competition, he said.

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The real solution is to let the market do its work to bring prices down. But that is a more complicated process than Williams lets on.

Back in 2007, when Research in Motion was Canada’s most valuable company, the Harper government appointed a panel of experts, led by former Nortel chair Lynton “Red” Wilson, to address concerns that the corporate sector was being “hollowed out” by foreign takeovers, following the sale of giants Alcan, Dofasco and Inco.

The “Compete to Win” report that came out in June 2008 found that the number of foreign-owned firms had remained relatively unchanged, but recommended 65 changes to make Canada more competitive.

The Harper government acted on the least-contentious suggestions: lowering corporate taxes, harmonizing sales taxes with a number of provinces and making immigration more responsive to labour markets.

But it did not end up liberalizing the banking, broadcasting, aviation or telecom markets, as the report suggested (ironically, it was a Liberal transport minister, Marc Garneau, who raised foreign ownership levels of air carriers to 49 per cent from 25 per cent in 2018).

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The point is, Canada has a competition problem but solving it requires taking on vested interests. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has indicated he is willing to do that, calling corporate lobbyists “utterly useless” and saying he will focus on Canadian workers, not corporate interests.

“My daily obsession will be about what is good for the working-class people in this country,” he said in Vancouver earlier this month.

Even opening up sectors to foreign competition is no guarantee that investors will come. There are no foreign ownership restrictions in the grocery market (in addition to the five supermarkets listed above, there is Amazon-owned Whole Foods). When the Competition Bureau concluded last year that there was a “modest but meaningful” increase in food prices, it recommended Ottawa encourage a foreign-owned player to enter the Canadian market. It was a recommendation adopted by Industry Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne, to no avail thus far.

But it is clear from the Bank’s warning that the Canadian economy requires some shock treatment.

Robert Scrivener, the chairman of Bell and Northern Telecom in the 1970s, called Canada a nation of overprotected underachievers. That is even more true now than it was back then.

It’s time to break the glass.

jivison@criffel.ca

Get even more deep-dive National Post political coverage and analysis in your inbox with the Political Hack newsletter, where Ottawa bureau chief Stuart Thomson and political analyst Tasha Kheiriddin get at what’s really going on behind the scenes on Parliament Hill every Wednesday and Friday, exclusively for subscribers. Sign up here.

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