Category: Market Action

The year’s final scheduled BoC rate decision was announced today:

The Bank of Canada today maintained its target for the overnight rate at the effective lower bound of ¼ percent, with the Bank Rate at ½ percent and the deposit rate at ¼ percent. The Bank is maintaining its extraordinary forward guidance, reinforced and supplemented by its quantitative easing (QE) program, which continues at its current pace of at least $4 billion per week.

The rebound in the global and Canadian economies has unfolded largely as the Bank had anticipated in its October Monetary Policy Report (MPR). More recently, news on the development of effective vaccines is providing reassurance that the pandemic will end and more normal activities will resume, although the pace and breadth of the global rollout of vaccinations remain uncertain. Near term, new waves of infections are expected to set back recoveries in many parts of the world. Accommodative policy and financial conditions are continuing to provide support across most regions. Stronger demand is pushing up prices for most commodities, including oil. A broad-based decline in the US exchange rate has contributed to a further appreciation of the Canadian dollar.

In Canada, national accounts data for the third quarter were consistent with the Bank’s expectations of a sharp economic rebound following the precipitous decline in the second quarter. The labour market continues to recoup the jobs that were lost at the start of the pandemic, albeit at a slower pace. However, activity remains highly uneven across different sectors and groups of workers. Economic momentum heading into the fourth quarter appears to be stronger than was expected in October but, in recent weeks, record high cases of COVID-19 in many parts of Canada are forcing re-imposition of restrictions. This can be expected to weigh on growth in the first quarter of 2021 and contribute to a choppy trajectory until a vaccine is widely available. The federal government’s recently announced measures should help maintain business and household incomes during this second wave of the pandemic and support the recovery.

CPI inflation in October picked up to 0.7 percent, largely reflecting higher prices for fresh fruits and vegetables. While this suggests a slightly firmer track for inflation in the fourth quarter, the outlook for inflation remains in line with the October MPR projection. Measures of core inflation are all below 2 percent, and considerable economic slack is expected to continue to weigh on inflation for some time.

Canada’s economic recovery will continue to require extraordinary monetary policy support. The Governing Council will hold the policy interest rate at the effective lower bound until economic slack is absorbed so that the 2 percent inflation target is sustainably achieved. In our October projection, this does not happen until into 2023. To reinforce this commitment and keep interest rates low across the yield curve, the Bank will continue its QE program until the recovery is well underway and will adjust it as required to help bring inflation back to target on a sustainable basis. We remain committed to providing the monetary policy stimulus needed to support the recovery and achieve the inflation objective.

It strikes me that their objective to “keep interest rates low across the yield curve” is not particularly compatible with the government’s objective to extend the average maturity of its debt, which is not going all that well:

Through to mid-November, 61 per cent of gross issuances were treasury bills, higher than the government’s goal of 47 per cent for the year as a whole. Conversely, long-term debt issues, with a maturity of 10 years or more, are running behind plan. Just 9 per cent of debt issued so far this fiscal year is long term; the debt-management plan calls for 15 per cent of gross debt issued this year (including treasury bills) to be long term.
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“Market participants indicated that the Bank of Canada’s Government Bond Purchase Program (GBPP) was the key factor in raising the unprecedented amount of long-term federal government debt in an orderly manner, since the GBPP absorbed a significant portion of the extra issuance,” the summary said.

Translated from the deliberately bland language of central banking, that statement hints that the central bank’s interventions have been needed to allow the government to issue as many long-term bonds as it had.

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Meanwhile, Fitch Ratings is making sounds of disapproval:

Canada’s recently released medium-term financial roadmap reinforces the likelihood of a rising public debt burden and expansionary fiscal policy without precise details of a return to a fiscal anchor and consolidation, says Fitch Ratings. Canada’s public financial profile would weaken relative to its ‘AA’ category peers if the federal budgets for fiscal years 2021-22 and 2022-23 adhere to the government’s medium-term operational forecasts and stimulus plans as outlined in the Fall Economic Statement (FES) without new revenue-raising measures.
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Large general government deficits will translate into a significant spike in consolidated general government debt to 117% of GDP for 2020, slightly higher than the 115% estimate when Canada was downgraded to ‘AA+’ in June. We continue to expect the debt level to rise to 125% in 2022. The government did note that ‘fiscal guardrails’ would be applied to guide an eventual winddown of stimulus upon hitting certain data-driven triggers. However, the precise nature of any long-term fiscal anchor has not yet been disclosed.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.04%, equivalent to 6.55% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield 2.80%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) has remained steady at the 375bp reported December 2.

Quadravest has announced:

Financial 15 Split Corp. (“Financial 15”) is pleased to announce it has reinstated Class A share dividends at a monthly distribution rate of $0.1257 for each post-consolidation FTN Class A share ($1.5084 annually) and declares $0.05625 for each FTN.PR.A Preferred share ($0.675 annually). The current rate for the Class A shares of $1.5084 is a post-consolidation yield of 17% based on Friday’s pre-consolidation closing price of $3.65. This is an increase in the dividend for the Class A shares from previous guidance. Distributions are payable January 8, 2021 to shareholders on record as at December 31, 2020.

Note that FTN will be trading on a pre-consolidation basis until ‘on or about December 17’.

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TXPR closed at 614.22, up 1.21% on the day. Volume today was 2.79-million, behind only November 24 and November 20 in the past 20 trading days.

CPD closed at 12.225, up 0.78% on the day. Volume was 86,780, a little above the median of the past 20 trading days.

ZPR closed at 9.73, up 0.83% on the day. Volume of 122,016 was below the median of the past 20 trading days.

Five-year Canada yields were down 1bp to 0.46% today.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 5.06%, equivalent to 6.58% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates now yield 2.84%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) has narrowed slightly (and perhaps spuriously) to 375bp from the 380bp reported November 25.

FAIR Canada, the superannuation scheme for OSC hacks, has got yet another payoff from the regulator:

The primary advocacy group for Canadian investors is receiving $3.75-million in funding to help it continue to operate over the next five years.

The Canadian Foundation for the Advancement of Investor Rights, known as FAIR Canada, will receive annual instalments of $750,000 over five years from Ontario’s provincial securities regulator.

The Ontario Securities Commission (OSC) will provide the funding as an allocation from its “designated fund” – money collected from sanction payments that can be used for investor protection, compensation for victims who have suffered financial losses, whistle-blower payments and for third parties such as FAIR.
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The funding comes several months after FAIR appointed a new executive director, Jean-Paul Bureaud, a former regulator who had worked for the OSC for 19 years before leaving in October, 2018. Mr. Bureaud replaced founder Ermanno Pascutto, who had returned to the position of executive director in early 2019 on an interim basis. Mr. Pascutto departed FAIR last month and is no longer on the board.

FAIR also boasts in an eMail:

In addition to OSC funding, FAIR Canada has received funding this year from the Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC), a national self-regulatory organization (SRO), and is having discussions with other organizations about contributing to FAIR’s future sustainability.

There’s just no shame in any of these guys.

How about that federal deficit, eh?

The federal government is planning a major stimulus program worth as much as $100-billion over three years to jolt the Canadian economy once the pandemic is under control, a pledge that is in addition to the hundreds of billions of dollars it has already spent to support workers and businesses through the COVID-19 crisis.

Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the new figures Monday in a wide-ranging fall economic statement that is essentially a mini-budget, complete with billions in new spending and targeted tax measures.

The update pushes the projected size of this year’s deficit to $381.6-billion, up from the $343.2-billion forecast in early July. The report notes that the deficit could be just shy of $400-billion if the pandemic worsens, leading to more restrictions.

There is still no indication as to how we’re going to pay for it.

OSFI is changing the rules for insurers’s seg fund capital requirements:

OSFI is developing a new approach to determine capital requirements for SFG risk, which will reflect the International Financial Reporting Standard 17 – Insurance Contracts (IFRS 17) that will become effective on January 1, 2023. The purpose of this letter is to provide additional details on the development of the approach.

Current regulatory capital requirements for SFG risk are determined using an approach that was implemented in the early 2000s. Here, requirements are calculated using a factor-based methodology or, if approved for use by OSFI, an insurer’s own internal model. The approach is based on calibrations that were developed several years ago and relies on IFRS 4 (i.e. the Canadian Asset Liability Method or CALM). Also, over the years, SFG product offerings have evolved and, in some cases, are not entirely addressed with the current methodology.

The new approach is being designed to address these issues. Under the new approach, capital requirements will be calculated by applying shocks to SFG liabilities. Internal models that were previously approved for use by OSFI to calculate SFG capital requirements will no longer be permitted for this purpose, once the new approach is implemented.