Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Personal Finances and Consumer Concerns, essays, stories, examples and how to articles with a distinctly Canadian Point of View

Archive for March 21st, 2007

What is a Leading Indicator?

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

If you read the Stats Canada Leading Indicators post you’ll learn what that means, and you’ll have learned something new today, which is always a good thing.

I think you can interpret this data as saying that Canada’s economy is sailing along nicely and expanding nicely too.

The “money supply” is expanding, but what does that one mean, I wonder? I always thought that if you keep adding more money to the economy you are in danger of creating inflation, unless of course the money is actually imports of external money, creating new revenues in Canada, in which case that is good (I think). Think I had better go read up on that one.

–C8j

More on this topic (What's this?)
The myth of plunging house prices
Canada – The Best Stock Market in the World
10-Yr+ US Treasury and Canada Yields Falling
Read more on Investing in Canada at Wikinvest

What another Budget? Ontario’s Stealth Budget

Wednesday, March 21st, 2007

Yes, the Ontario Provincial Budget is due out tomorrow, and this one should be interesting since it is the last budget before the upcoming provincial election this fall. Can I find much analysis or guesswork out there about what might be included? Not much really, I found Mr. McGuinty’s response to the Federal Budget on the Provincial Liberal’s web site but not much else right now.

I have heard talk that there is a plan to raise the minimum wage in Ontario to around $10 an hour, but that is only planned to be phased in over the next three years or so, currently it is around $8/hour. So someone working the minimum wage for a 42 hour work week is going to gross about $340.00, a week, doesn’t seem like enough to live on to me.

There are comments about post secondary funding I have heard, but nothing concrete mentioned as of yet. There will need to be closure on any election promises from 4 years ago, but then again, I don’t remember much of those either.

This seems to be almost a Stealth Budget about to be brought down by Queens Park. The Liberals hope you don’t read it, or even think about it? That’s a little cynical, I guess, but still, no one seems to care about it.

More on this topic (What's this?)
2009, a new financial year
State and Local Budget Meltdown
Another NYC budget buster
Treasure Budget
Read more on Budget, Minimum Wage at Wikinvest
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