Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Manufacturing is recovering nicely and the ludicrous levels of household spending is slowing, which is actually a good thing (since a lot of that spending is debt increasing).

Household spending was mixed. Furniture and appliance sales continued to expand steadily. Housing levelled off, largely because housing starts returned to more normal levels after receiving a boost from the unseasonably warm start to the year. Purchases of other durable goods fell for a second straight month, largely due to slower auto sales.

Good to read that.

Did you notice a big change? Hope not, I am taking small steps towards revamping the site’s look, so this is the NEW blogspot format, which I will try to fix up a little, and then move to a new look. Mrs. C8j has given her seal of approval so far, and that is all I can hope for.

Related Links

• Canadian Economy Chugs along for March 2007
• What is a Leading Indicator?

So we can all guess where the most economic growth was in 2006 (hint: Starts with AL ends with BERTA), no surprise there, if the Americans don’t annex it, Alberta could be a member of OPEC by itself.

Who is #2? For those of you who said Ontario, please sit down, and for the rest of you, give up, because it was Nunavut (so it was a trick question, since Nunavut is a Territory). I guess having diamond mines and natural resources doesn’t hurt your economy, now does it?

British Columbia is the #2 province, construction, Olympics and trees are the three key words there.

Again, Canada is doing well, take a bow Canadian Worker!

Leading indicators for March are up 0.4% and if you view that with the 0.7% increase from the month before, I’d say we are seeing a trend?

Easy to say, but we have been positive leading indicators for the past two years, which reinforces the statement that the Canadian economy is doing quite well thank you very much.

Higher stock prices, continued consumer spending being positive and the manufacturing business recovering (thanks to an increase in US demand), means good things for Canada for now.

Keep up the good work Canadian worker!

Another Stats Canada posting points out that Car prices in Canada continue to rise (for the fifth year in a row). Must mean a strong demand, since you can’t raise prices on things nobody wants (I learned that at ECON 101).

Canadians continue to buy North American, but we also continue our trend towards buying cars from overseas manufacturers as well (at about 33% of all passenger cars bought now). Given Toyota is now the leading manufacturer in the world, wonder what that means? Are Toyota’s built in Canada counted as a car manufactured overseas? I think so, which is interesting.

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