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Economy

Posthaste: What Canada’s mysterious rise in insolvencies says about the economy – Financial Post

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4 years ago

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Good Morning!

So what’s up with rising household insolvencies in Canada? In September they saw a 19% spike from a year earlier, the biggest annual gain since 2009. So far this year, there have been 102,023 consumer insolvencies, the second-most for the first nine months of a year in records dating back to 1987. True, the gains come from low levels, but they are accelerating at a pace that’s normally seen in times of economic distress.

“Obviously, this is not the typical cyclical climb in household credit stress,” write CIBC economists Benjamin Tal and Avery Shenfeld in a report this week.

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We are not in a recession; unemployment before November was near multi-decade lows. Nor is this an Alberta problem. Ontario saw just as big a spike as this province which is enduring a prolonged downturn. The only provinces that escaped the national increase were Quebec and Saskatchewan.

Tal and Shenfeld say clues to why we are seeing higher insolvencies in what looks like a healthy environment — and a lesson for investors, lenders and monetary policy makers — can be found in the type of debt experiencing rising write-off rates.

Mortgage debt, where arrears have “trended steadily downward,” is not the problem. “It’s the performance of non-mortgage consumer debt that is the canary in the coal mine we need to watch for turning points in the credit cycle,” says their report.

More specifically debt where rates are tied to the prime rate that rose with Bank of Canada hikes in 2018. CIBC says writeoffs are up sharply on both unsecured lines of credits (ULOCs) and secured lines of credit (HELOC), but credit card debt, where rates are not tied to monetary policy, is not seeing this trend.

“Households have been shifting debt from credit cards to lines to save on interest costs but were then squeezed as rate on ULOCs began to climb.”

Tal and Shenfeld say there is a clear trend that increases in delinquencies are coming from interest-rate-sensitive products and much of that increase took place after rate hikes by the Bank of Canada pushed up the prime rate.

The takeaway is that the Canadian “economy, with its legacy of higher household debt, would be more sensitive to interest rate hikes than in the past.”

“If raising the overnight rate to only 1.75% could set off a climb in insolvencies, before any major job losses have been seen, it’s clear that taking rates to anywhere near what was historically neutral, or even where some models might currently put neutral, could prove to be overkill,” the economists conclude.

Here’s what you need to know this morning:

  • Bank of England releases interest rate decision
  • Ahmed Hussen, Minister of Families, Children and Social Development and Minister responsible for Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Steve Clark, Ontario Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing and John Tory, Mayor of Toronto, make an announcement in Toronto related to housing in Ontario
  • RCMP hold news conference in Edmonton about charges laid in $15-million money-laundering operation linked to illegal online cannabis sales
  • Notable earnings: Nike
  • Today’s data: Canadian wholesale trade, U.S. existing home sales, current account balance

Women alive today will not see world gender parity in their lifetime, was the conclusion of a report that created a lot of buzz this week. This year’s World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report calculates that worldwide gender parity is still 99.5 years away, or more than a lifetime for most of us, as the chart by Bloomberg below shows. One of the major battlegrounds for parity is economic participation where the gap widened in 2019 to 57.8% from 58.1% the year before. This gap will take now take 257 years to close, compared to the estimate of 202 years in 2018. Technological advances have hit women with a “triple whammy”, says the WEF. There are more women in the roles hit hardest by automation, not enough of them are entering professions, often technology-driven, where wage growth is greatest and lack of care infrastructure and access to capital limits them from becoming entrepreneurs. “As a result, women in work too often find themselves in middle-low wage categories that have been stagnant since the financial crisis 10 years ago,” the report said.

— Please send your news, comments and stories to pheaven@postmedia.com. — Pamela Heaven @pamheaven

With files from The Canadian Press, Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg

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Economy

Climate Change Will Cost Global Economy $38 Trillion Every Year Within 25 Years, Scientists Warn – Forbes

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6 hours ago

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April 17, 2024

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Topline

Climate change is on track to cost the global economy $38 trillion a year in damages within the next 25 years, researchers warned on Wednesday, a baseline that underscores the mounting economic costs of climate change and continued inaction as nations bicker over who will pick up the tab.

Key Facts

Damages from climate change will set the global economy back an estimated $38 trillion a year by 2049, with a likely range of between $19 trillion and $59 trillion, warned a trio of researchers from Potsdam and Berlin in Germany in a peer reviewed study published in the journal Nature.

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To obtain the figure, researchers analyzed data on how climate change impacted the economy in more than 1,600 regions around the world over the past 40 years, using this to build a model to project future damages compared to a baseline world economy where there are no damages from human-driven climate change.

The model primarily considers the climate damages stemming from changes in temperature and rainfall, the researchers said, with first author Maximilian Kotz, a researcher at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, noting these can impact numerous areas relevant to economic growth like “agricultural yields, labor productivity or infrastructure.”

Importantly, as the model only factored in data from previous emissions, these costs can be considered something of a floor and the researchers noted the world economy is already “committed to an income reduction of 19% within the next 26 years,” regardless of what society now does to address the climate crisis.

Global costs are likely to rise even further once other costly extremes like weather disasters, storms and wildfires that are exacerbated by climate change are considered, Kotz said.

The researchers said their findings underscore the need for swift and drastic action to mitigate climate change and avoid even higher costs in the future, stressing that a failure to adapt could lead to average global economic losses as high as 60% by 2100.

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How Do The Costs Of Inaction Compare To Taking Action?

Cost is a major sticking point when it comes to concrete action on climate change and money has become a key lever in making climate a “culture war” issue. The costs and logistics involved in transitioning towards a greener, more sustainable economy and moving to net zero are immense and there are significant vested interests such as the fossil fuel industry, which is keen to retain as much of the profitable status quo for as long as possible. The researchers acknowledged the sizable costs of adapting to climate change but said inaction comes with a cost as well. The damages estimated already dwarf the costs associated with the money needed to keep climate change in line with the limits set out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, the researchers said, referencing the globally agreed upon goalpost set to minimize damage and slash emissions. The $38 trillion estimate for damages is already six times the $6 trillion thought needed to meet that threshold, the researchers said.

Crucial Quote

“We find damages almost everywhere, but countries in the tropics will suffer the most because they are already warmer,” said study author Anders Levermann. The researcher, also of the Potsdam Institute, explained there is a “considerable inequity of climate impacts” around the world and that “further temperature increases will therefore be most harmful” in tropical countries. “The countries least responsible for climate change” are expected to suffer greater losses, Levermann added, and they are “also the ones with the least resources to adapt to its impacts.”

What To Watch For

The fundamental inequality over who is impacted most by climate change and who has benefited most from the polluting practices responsible for the climate crisis—who also have more resources to mitigate future damages—has become one of the most difficult political sticking points when it comes to negotiating global action to reduce emissions. Less affluent countries bearing the brunt of climate change argue wealthy nations like the U.S. and Western Europe have already reaped the benefits from fossil fuels and should pay more to cover the losses and damages poorer countries face, as well as to help them with the costs of adapting to greener sources of energy. Other countries, notably big polluters India and China, stymie negotiations by arguing they should have longer to wean themselves off of fossil fuels as their emissions actually pale in comparison to those of more developed countries when considered in historical context and on a per capita basis. Climate financing is expected to be key to upcoming negotiations at the United Nations’s next climate summit in November. The COP29 summit will be held in Baku, the capital city of oil-rich Azerbaijan.

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Economy

Canada's budget 2024 and what it means for the economy – Financial Post

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8 hours ago

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April 17, 2024

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Opinion: Canada's economy has stagnated despite Trudeau government spin – Financial Post

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10 hours ago

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April 17, 2024

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Growth in gross domestic product (GDP), the total value of all goods and services produced in the economy annually, is one of the most frequently cited indicators of economic performance. To assess Canadian living standards and the current health of the economy, journalists, politicians and analysts often compare Canada’s GDP growth to growth in other countries or in Canada’s past. But GDP is misleading as a measure of living standards when population growth rates vary greatly across countries or over time.

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Federal Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland recently boasted that Canada had experienced the “strongest economic growth in the G7” in 2022. In this she echoes then-prime minister Stephen Harper, who said in 2015 that Canada’s GDP growth was “head and shoulders above all our G7 partners over the long term.”

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Unfortunately, such statements do more to obscure public understanding of Canada’s economic performance than enlighten it. Lately, our aggregate GDP growth has been driven primarily by population and labour force growth, not productivity improvements. It is not mainly the result of Canadians becoming better at producing goods and services and thus generating more real income for their families. Instead, it is a result of there simply being more people working. That increases the total amount of goods and services produced but doesn’t translate into increased living standards.

Let’s look at the numbers. From 2000 to 2023 Canada’s annual average growth in real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) GDP growth was the second highest in the G7 at 1.8 per cent, just behind the United States at 1.9 per cent. That sounds good — until you adjust for population. Then a completely different story emerges.

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Over the same period, the growth rate of Canada’s real per person GDP (0.7 per cent) was meaningfully worse than the G7 average (1.0 per cent). The gap with the U.S. (1.2 per cent) was even larger. Only Italy performed worse than Canada.

Why the inversion of results from good to bad? Because Canada has had by far the fastest population growth rate in the G7, an average of 1.1 per cent per year — more than twice the 0.5 per cent experienced in the G7 as a whole. In aggregate, Canada’s population increased by 29.8 per cent during this period, compared to just 11.5 per cent in the entire G7.

Starting in 2016, sharply higher rates of immigration have led to a pronounced increase in Canada’s population growth. This increase has obscured historically weak economic growth per person over the same period. From 2015 to 2023, under the Trudeau government, real per person economic growth averaged just 0.3 per cent. That compares with 0.8 per cent annually under Brian Mulroney, 2.4 per cent under Jean Chrétien and 2.0 per cent under Paul Martin.

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Canada is neither leading the G7 nor doing well in historical terms when it comes to economic growth measures that make simple adjustments for our rapidly growing population. In reality, we’ve become a growth laggard and our living standards have largely stagnated for the better part of a decade.

Ben Eisen, Milagros Palacios and Lawrence Schembri are analysts at the Fraser Institute.

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