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U.S. Federal Reserve delivers small interest rate hike, signals a ‘couple’ more increases necessary to tackle inflation

Published

2 months ago

February 2, 2023

Megan Johnson

Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell speaks during a news conference at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington on Feb. 1.Jacquelyn Martin/The Associated Press

The U.S. Federal Reserve increased its benchmark interest rate by a quarter percentage point on Wednesday and signalled that a “couple” more rate hikes are still needed to bring inflation under control.

The widely anticipated announcement lifted the federal funds rate to a range of 4.5 per cent to 4.75 per cent. The quarter-point move is the smallest increase since the central bank began ratcheting up borrowing costs last spring in an effort to curb surging prices.

After a string of oversized rate hikes, the U.S. economy has begun to slow and inflation is showing signs of easing. Fed chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday that “the disinflationary process has started,” although he warned that it would be “very premature to declare victory.”

“While recent developments are encouraging, we will need substantially more evidence to be confident that inflation is on a sustained downward path,” he said in a news conference after the rate announcement.

While the Fed was unambiguous that “ongoing increases” in borrowing costs are still necessary, financial markets responded positively to Mr. Powell’s relatively optimistic comments about inflation and the U.S. economy.

The S&P 500 finished the trading day up 1.05 per cent, while the Nasdaq Composite surged 2 per cent. Bond markets also rallied, with the yield on two-year U.S. government bonds falling around 0.1 per cent. Bond prices and yields move in opposite directions.

“While previous statements said the Fed would have to determine the pace of future rate rises, today’s statement indicated it will now have to determine their extent,” Desjardins economist Francis Généreux wrote in a note to clients. “Rate hikes aren’t over, but it may be the beginning of the end.”

Members of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed’s highest decision-making body, which sets U.S. monetary policy, signalled in December that they expect the fed funds rate to exceed 5 per cent by the end of the year. That would imply at least two more quarter-point hikes.

Mr. Powell reiterated this forecast, although he said future rate hikes would be conditional on incoming economic data. He also pushed back against market expectations that the Fed could start cutting interest rates this year. Interest-rate-swap contracts are pricing at least two rate cuts before the end of 2023.

“The historical record cautions strongly against prematurely loosening policy. We will stay the course, until the job is done,” Mr. Powell said.

The Fed’s insistence that more rate hikes are still needed puts it on a different trajectory than the Bank of Canada.

Last week, Canada’s central bank increased its benchmark rate to 4.5 per cent, but said it expects to hold off further rate hikes. This “conditional pause” suggests that Canadian rates have reached a plateau while U.S. rates will keep marching higher.

The Canadian economy is generally seen as being more sensitive to interest rates than the U.S. economy, given how much of the Canadian economy relies on the housing sector. Canadian mortgages also tend to have five-year terms, compared with 30-year terms in the United States, making homeowners more susceptible to rate increases.

What happens next to U.S. interest rates will depend on the trajectory of inflation as well as the strength of the country’s labour market.

There are plenty of signs that inflation is trending in the right direction. The annual rate of consumer price index inflation in the U.S. was 6.5 per cent in December, down from a 40-year high of 9.1 per cent in June.

Prices for many goods, such as used vehicles, have fallen in recent months, as supply chains have improved and consumer demand has shifted back toward services. Mr. Powell said he also expects housing-related inflation to diminish in the coming months.

The challenge is service prices, excluding housing, which show few signs of decelerating. This is tied in part to rapid wage growth, which is being driven by the ultralow levels of unemployment, which stood at a record low 3.5 per cent in December.

Mr. Powell said unemployment will likely need to rise to slow the pace of service price growth. He expects this to happen in the coming quarters as higher rates work to slow the economy. Although, he suggested that a soft landing was still possible.

“There’s a path to getting inflation back down to 2 per cent without a really significant economic decline or a significant increase in unemployment,” he said.

The European Central Bank and the Bank of England will announce their latest interest-rate decisions on Thursday. The central banks are behind the Bank of Canada and the Fed when it comes to tightening monetary policy, and both are expected to announce further half-point rate increases.

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Millennials dominate insolvencies as credit card, student loan, CERB tax debts add up – BNN Bloomberg

Published

2 mins ago

March 27, 2023

Megan Johnson

Insolvency trustee Doug Hoyes encounters a lot of Canadians with money troubles, but he’s become particularly sympathetic to the plight of young people who find themselves financially underwater.

For more than a decade, his Ontario-based firm Hoyes Michalos has been crunching bankruptcy and insolvency numbers for its annual “Joe Debtor” analysis, with its latest results released last month ahead of tax season.

He’s concluded that millennial Canadians have been dealt a generational losing hand as they face student loans layered with bad debts from credit cards, high-interest loans, and post-pandemic tax debt from collecting CERB.

“I think there’s a whole bunch of whammies that have hit millennials.” Hoyes said. “The CERB was the final straw that broke the camel’s back.”

The 2022 Joe Debtor study examined 2,700 personal insolvencies filed in Ontario. Hoyes Michalos says 49 per cent were filed by millennials aged 26 to 41, even though they make up 27 per cent of adult Canadians.

The study found that on a per-population basis, millennials were 1.4 times more likely to file for insolvency than people in generation X aged 42 to 56, and 1.7 times more likely than baby boomers aged 57 to 76.

Insolvent millennials were on average 33 years old and owed an average of $47,283 in unsecured debt.

Hoyes said many people collected CERB and other pandemic-relief funds without fully appreciating the tax liabilities those programs generated, finding themselves insolvent and unable to pay down their credit cards, student loans, high-interest loans, and lastly their tax debts.

More than 100,000 Canadians of all ages filed for bankruptcy or insolvency in 2022.

But older generations, Hoyes said, have enjoyed many advantages.

Housing prices were more in step with wages. Tuition fees didn’t necessitate student loans, allowing graduates to enter the workforce and start saving and investing out of the gate, rather than having to service large debts for years after completing their education.

Hoyes said those circumstances represented a “safety valve” that young people now can’t rely on.

“Anything goes wrong like a pandemic, or you lose your job or you get sick or you get divorced and boom, there is no safety valve there,” he said.

Filing for bankruptcy, he said, is an option to eliminate debts, but most people end up filing consumer proposals with the help of insolvency trustees like him to pay them down over time in manageable portions.

“It becomes an affordable way to eliminate the debt, and that’s why we’re seeing more and more millennials resorting to consumer proposals,” he said. “They really have no other choice.”

Sandra Fry, a Winnipeg-based credit counsellor with the non-profit Credit Counselling Society, said many young people who seek alternatives to insolvency and bankruptcy are dealing with the shock of rising interest rates.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people out there are living on the edge of their affordability,” Fry said.

Fry said the Credit Counselling Society sees all types of people struggling financially with rising costs that are “really squeezing Canadians in general from all sides.”

The society helps people struggling with debt, negotiating with creditors to eliminate interest on loans, but also refers people in some situations to bankruptcy and insolvency trustees.

Millennial clients she’s dealt with lately have often had variable interest rate mortgages, and rate hikes “caused huge strain on their budget because their payments just went up like crazy.”

Dave Locke, 31, lives with his wife in Coquitlam, B.C., east of Vancouver, and the couple sought Fry’s help when their mortgage payments jumped dramatically in the middle of a costly renovation.

Locke, who works for a real estate brokerage, got into the housing market at a young age having worked in the oil and gas industry after high school.

He ended up buying a home in Coquitlam with his wife Tara, who works in labour relations, and the Bank of Canada’s rate hikes eventually saw their monthly mortgage payments jump 40 per cent.

The couple had a construction loan with their bank to fund the renovations, and as interest rates climbed and the price of construction materials ballooned, Locke realized something had to give, even with their relatively high combined incomes.

Insolvency or bankruptcy weren’t options for the couple because they wanted to keep their assets, but the Credit Counselling Society was able to work out a deal with their bank to eliminate interest on the renovation loan.

“I’m still paying the full balance,” Locke said. “I’m just not paying any additional interest.”

Locke said the stress and stigma of debt is embarrassing, “but it’s just the way it goes.”

“You have to kind of swallow your pride,” he said.

Grant Bazian, a licensed insolvency trustee and president of MNP Ltd. in Vancouver, said he’s seen many clients “keeping up with the Joneses,” but living beyond their means and getting stuck in a cycle of high interest debt from payday loans and credit cards, layered on top of “ridiculous” housing costs.

Bazian said there’s likely no “one magic bullet” to alleviate the debt woes of young people, many of whom are coming to see him racked with anxiety and other mental health issues.

For accountant Hoyes back in Ontario, putting out the firm’s Joe Debtor study every year is a way of letting people know they’re not alone and to remind them of legal options to start anew financially.

Hoyes said it would be a mistake to automatically blame millennials for their money trouble because “you cannot be blaming an entire generation for how the deck is stacked against them.”

“You don’t have to keep working two jobs for the next 20 years,” he said. “There are legal ways to eliminate a chunk of your debt, and yeah, it hurts your credit temporarily and it’s not something you want to do, but sometimes surgery is the answer.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 26, 2023.

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Sharp hike in federal alcohol excise duty will drive up price of booze, Ottawa distilleries and breweries say – Ottawa Citizen

Published

10 hours ago

March 26, 2023

Megan Johnson

Marc Plante (left) and Justin MacNeill, co-owners of Stray Dog Brewing Company in the east end of Ottawa. Photo by Ashley Fraser /POSTMEDIA

For Ottawa distilleries and breweries, April 1 each year brings, rather than jokes or pranks, increases in the federal excise duty they must pay. This year, the especially steep hike is no laughing matter.

The alcohol excise duties imposed on manufacturers are adjusted annually based on inflation. But while booze businesses have coped in recent years with two-per-cent increases, this year’s duty is set to increase 6.3 per cent as of Saturday.

The result, Ottawa distilleries and breweries say, will be more expensive alcoholic beverages for consumers, including restaurants, bars and the general public, as manufacturers who are still coping with pandemic-induced pressures, are forced to recoup the latest additional expenses.

“It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that prices across the board have to go up. They have to,” says Marc Plante, a co-owner of Stray Dog Brewing Company in Orléans. “It’s not going to be, ‘Boom! Here comes the increase,’ and everyone’s going to see it. It will be slow. It will be subtle.”

Citing a press secretary for Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland and Canada Revenue Agency figures, the Canadian Press reported that the increased federal excise tax works out to less than a penny on a can of beer and three cents on a 750-mL bottle of wine.

Still, Plante says the beers his micro-brewery makes will be more expensive “eventually,” although he can’t when the hike will happen or how big it will be. Stray Dog, which launched in 2017, has held its prices stable for several years, absorbing increased expenses and even debts incurred during the pandemic, Plante says.

He compares his company’s efforts to cope with COVID-19 to “a death by a thousand cuts.”

“Unfortunately, there’s only so much that small businesses like mine can absorb, and so we have to start passing some of those costs down to the consumers,” he says.

On a litre of wine, the excise duty rate is increasing to $0.731 from $0.688, or a little over four cents, according to figures provided by the Canada Revenue Agency. For a 750 ml bottle of wine, the increase would be closer to three cents.

Plante says he feels sorry for consumers. “The way inflation is right now, consumers are the ones getting the hits the hardest,” he says. Calling beer “one of the few pleasures in life,” and adds: “When you start pricing that out of people’s wallets, what do they have left?”

He adds that he feels worse for distilleries, who face a tougher tax regimen than do breweries and wineries.

“I would never get into that business,” he says.

The Ontario Spirits Tax is 61.5 per cent on the cost of the goods. Given that, Adam Brierley, founder of Ogham Craft Spirits in Kanata, says that if he tries to recoup the extra 25 cents of excise duty per bottle imposed this year, he’ll be taxed provincially for that effort and need to raise his prices again to break even.

“On the surface, we’re talking about 25 cents a bottle, but there are ripple effects,” Brierley says. “It’s just another thing that continues to kick the industry while it’s down.”

The increased excise duty hits distillers even as the costs of bottles, labels, grains, botanicals and more are getting more expensive, driving down profit margins, says Brierley, who launched Ogham in late 2021.

He figures that he will maintain the prices of some of his products until the current batch is sold, and then re-assess. The price of upcoming products will increase, he says, giving the example of Ogham’s maple eau de vie, currently priced at $60 but likely to rise by $5 or more due to the excise hike and the increased cost of maple syrup.

John Criswick, co-founder of Perth-based Top Shelf Distillers, says he intends to hold the line and not raise the price of Top Shelf’s products “for now.”

Still, he faults the increased excise duty for helping to increase liquor prices and, with them, inflation.

Brierley contends that while excise duty increases are pegged to inflation, he would have liked to have seen the federal government freeze the increase at two per cent, as in recent years.

Greg Lipin, a co-founder of North of 7 Distillery on St. Laurent Boulevard, says Canadian craft distillers as a whole want relief from the federal excise regimen, which applies equally to mega-distilleries and to comparatively much smaller operations such as theirs.

In the U.S., there’s one rate for craft distillers and another for bigger players, “which is what we’re looking for,” Lipin says.

During its decade of being in business, North of 7 has not changed its prices, preferring to absorb tax hikes, Lipin says.

“I haven’t entertained raising the prices of my products. But I will at some point, with these increases,” he says.

Rod Castro, the owner of 10Fourteen and Pubblico Eatery, two Wellington Street West restaurants, said the spike in the excise duty should not be surprising, as it follows on recent reports on the negative impact of alcohol and revised recommendations for alcohol consumption.

Still, he says: “As is usual, the government fails to really show they have a care or have a pulse for small- and medium-sized businesses and burden us as they do the consumer.”

phum@postmedia.com

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Twitter source code leaked online: legal filing

Published

11 hours ago

March 26, 2023

Megan Johnson

NEW YORK –

Some parts of Twitter’s source code — the fundamental computer code on which the social network runs — were leaked online, the social media company said in a legal filing on Sunday.

According to the legal document, filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, Twitter had asked GitHub, an internet hosting service for software development, to take down the code where it was posted. The platform complied and said the content had been disabled, according to the filing. Twitter also asked the court to identify the alleged infringer or infringers who posted Twitter’s source code on systems operated by GitHub without Twitter’s authorization.

Twitter noted in the filing that the postings infringe copyrights held by Twitter.

The leak creates more challenges for billionaire Elon Musk, who bought Twitter last October for US$44 billion and has had massive layoffs since then.

The news was first reported by the New York Times.

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