PrefBlog

Here’s a sign of the times from Vancouver:

Nearly six years after Vancouver became the largest city in Canada to commit to a living wage, councillors voted to end the initiative.

In a closed-door meeting in January, council approved the action and directed staff to implement what it calls a “fair wage,” by calculating the average of five years of living wages.

The city says in a statement that the living wage rate for 2023 would have gone up more than 17 per cent to just above $24 an hour, immediately influencing its pay structure.
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The living wage is the hourly amount two adults working full time must earn to support the basic needs of a family of four, but it does not cover debt repayment or savings for retirement.

The hourly living wage for Metro Vancouver is set at $24.08, but Anastasia French, with Living Wage for Families BC, says Vancouver’s change will cut earnings for its workers and contractors to at least $20.90 an hour.

We wouldn’t want to hike the property tax now, would we? But it could also be a good-faith effort to incorporate the subsidizing effect of rent control into the Living Wage calculation. The discussion of the calculation is interesting:

The BC living wage calculation has relied on the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) annual rental market survey for our estimate of rent, using its data for median monthly rent for units with three or more bedrooms in the primary rental market.

This number has always represented a very modest rent budget in Metro Vancouver and understated the financial pressures faced by families that have to move because it aggregates the rents paid by long-term tenants who have benefitted from BC’s rent control measures and those who have recently moved and typically pay higher rents. However, as vacancy rates have declined and housing prices spiked in Metro Vancouver and many other BC communities over the last 14 years, the difference in rents that new and long-term tenants are paying has sharply widened. Further complicating matters, the CMHC data only include purpose-built rental units, which are referred to as the primary rental market. The secondary rental market (i.e., renting privately owned houses and condos or basement and other secondary suites) has grown significantly since the living wage methodology was first developed but is not captured in the median rent figure.

As a result, the CMHC data on primary rental market median rents became an increasingly less reliable measure of the rents families are paying, and it now no longer reflects a realistic rent budget for a family with two young children (and likely hasn’t for the last few years). This is true both in Metro Vancouver and elsewhere in BC, as we heard loud and clear from our community calculation partners during the 2021 round of living wage calculations. To develop a more realistic estimate of the rent cost faced by families, we used 2016 census data to estimate the “moving penalty” faced by households who had to find housing within the previous year. We use the 2016 census data to estimate this moving penalty because it is the latest census data available at the time of writing.

The census data confirm that families with children move frequently. Within the previous year, 25 per cent of BC couple families with children had moved.6

These families paid considerably higher median rents—12 per cent higher in 2016 compared to the overall median (i.e., including longer-term and new tenancies). The data also show that the moving penalty is higher for households living in three-bedroom housing than for those living in one- or two-bedroom units.

We apply this moving penalty to the CMHC median rental figures for 2022 to get a more reliable estimate of the rent cost pressures faced by families in BC.

For Metro Vancouver, the moving penalty increases the living wage family’s rent costs from $1,952 (the CMHC median rent figure) to $2,186 monthly.

So if I’m reading that right, the Living Wage people are assuming that their model family moves each and every year and never gets any benefit at all from rent control. That doesn’t sound right. The basic idea sounds good, but it seems to me that their implementation assumption is a little extreme.

I have long thought that rent control has the unanticipated result of decreasing labour mobility, so it’s nice to see the concept get a nod here. I don’t advocate eliminating rent control; but I think the annual allowable increase should be inflation plus an increment (say, 1%?), rather than inflation with a cap or even a freeze, depending on which way the wind is blowing.

On a positive note, TC Energy’s pumped storage project took a step forward:

TC Energy Corporation (TSX, NYSE: TRP) (TC Energy or the Company) announced today that Meaford Municipal Council passed a resolution of support for the Company’s proposed Ontario Pumped Storage Project subject to conditions outlined below.

This development project is a transformative 1,000-megawatt clean energy storage facility, proposed for construction on the Department of National Defence’s 4th Canadian Division Training Centre in Meaford, Ontario. As one of Canada’s largest energy storage proposals, the project would provide safe, reliable power, support made-in-Ontario economic growth, and aid in the transition to emission-free power generation.
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The Meaford Council’s support is contingent on TC Energy fulfilling the following conditions: 1) Reasonable cost recovery by TC Energy for all costs incurred by the Municipality; 2) Development of a regulatory plan to address the Municipality’s role throughout the project’s lifecycle; 3) Successful negotiation of a Community Benefits Agreement with the Municipality; and 4) Completion of all applicable federal and provincial environmental assessment processes and obtain all associated permits and approvals.

The IMF has published an article by Claudio Borio titled MONETARY POLICY UNDER TEST:

In the latest Bank for International Settlements Annual Economic Report, we offer a different perspective on the inflation process, one that yields a more sobering message. It sees inflation as a two-regime process—a low- and a high-inflation regime —with self-reinforcing transitions from low to high.

Inflation behaves very differently in the two regimes.

When inflation has settled at a low level, what we measure as increases in the overall price level mostly reflect price changes in specific sectors that are only loosely correlated with one another. Those price changes tend to leave but a temporary imprint on the inflation rate itself. Equally important, wages and prices, which are at the core of the inflation process, are only loosely linked to each other. As a result, inflation has certain self-stabilizing properties.

By contrast, a high-inflation regime has no such properties. The importance of the common component of price changes is much greater, wages and prices are more tightly linked, and inflation is especially sensitive to changes in salient prices, such as those of food and energy, as well as to fluctuations in the exchange rate.

The European inflation report was mixed:

Consumer prices in the 20 countries that use the euro as their currency rose at an annual rate of 8.5 percent in February, down slightly from January’s rate of 8.6 percent. Year-over-year rates have been declining since reaching a peak 10.6 percent in October.

But some of the largest economies showed troubling increases, and core inflation — a measure that excludes the most erratic categories like food and energy — rose to a record high of 5.6 percent in February, from 5.3 percent.

Interesting things are happening with mortgages:

New data from CIBC show that $52-billion worth of mortgages – the equivalent of 20 per cent of the bank’s $263-billion residential loan portfolio – were in a position where the borrower’s monthly payment was not high enough to cover even the interest portion of the loans. The bank has allowed these borrowers to stretch out the length of time it takes to pay off the loan, which is known as the amortization period. As well, borrowers are adding unpaid interest onto their original loan or principal.
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CIBC’s filing, for the first quarter that ended in January, is the only one to provide increased transparency on the impact of higher interest rates on its variable-rate portfolio. The same filing said that in the fourth quarter, $39-billion worth of mortgages were negatively amortizing. That grew to $52-billion in the first quarter, said the footnote in the filing. Last summer, the bank said its borrowers were not yet putting unpaid interest onto the principal.
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The most recent quarterly filings from the big banks show that a chunk of their mortgage loans have amortization periods of more than 30 years.

At BMO, the proportion of residential mortgages with amortization periods longer than 30 years reached 32.4 per cent in January. At CIBC, the percentage was 30 per cent. At TD it was 29.3 per cent and at Royal Bank of Canada, it was 25 per cent, according to their regulatory filings.

BIS has released a bulletin by Sarah Bell, Michael Chui, Tamara Gomes, Paul Moser-Boehm and Albert Pierres Tejada titled Why are central banks reporting losses? Does it matter?:

Key takeaways

• • Rising interest rates are reducing profits or even leading to losses at some central banks, especially those that purchased domestic currency assets for macroeconomic and financial stability objectives.
• • Losses and negative equity do not directly affect the ability of central banks to operate effectively.
• • In normal times and in crises, central banks should be judged on whether they fulfil their mandates.
• • Central banks can underscore their continued ability to achieve policy objectives by clearly explaining the reasons for losses and highlighting the overall benefits of their policy measures.

Central banks can mitigate the risk of misperception through effective communication to their stakeholders. They can clarify the context for potential losses, noting how the measures were undertaken to ensure price and economic stability over the medium and long-term for the benefit of households and businesses, which incidentally boosted economy-wide income and hence the overall tax base. In their public communications, central banks can prepare stakeholders for losses at the outset of policy interventions, explaining that APPs or other programmes carry financial risk. And they can reiterate these messages when losses are imminent, explaining how central bank finances work and that losses are not relevant for policy. Several central banks have already done so when publishing their recent financial statements or through other public communications.11

To conclude, a central bank’s credibility depends on its ability to achieve its mandates. Losses do not jeopardise that ability and are sometimes the price to pay for achieving those aims (Nordstrom and Vredin (2022)). To maintain the public’s trust and to preserve central bank legitimacy now and in the long run, stakeholders should appreciate that central banks’ policy mandates come before profits.

TD Bank’s acquisition of New Horizons might be in trouble:

TD-T … prospects of closing a major acquisition in the United States took a hit Wednesday after its merger partner, FHN-N … , disclosed that the deal is struggling to receive regulatory blessings in a timely manner.

In an annual filing, First Horizon, which is based in Memphis, Tenn., disclosed that TD TD-T … recently told its management team that TD does not expect to get the required regulatory approvals in time to complete the deal before May 27, which is when their merger agreement is set to expire.
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First Horizon disclosed in its annual filing Wednesday that “receipt of regulatory approvals for the pending TD merger has taken longer than originally anticipated.”

First Horizon’s shares closed down 11 per cent to US$22.14. TD agreed to pay US$25 a share in a deal worth US$13.4-billion.

The IMF looks at its recent inflation forecasts:

The IMF produces and publishes its World Economic Outlook forecasts on a quarterly basis—these include GDP growth and inflation. We recently dissected the errors in our core inflation forecasts for the world’s economies—that is, forecasts of inflation stripped of the volatile effects of food and energy price swings.
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We consider four factors that, with the benefit of hindsight, help us rationalize inflation underpredictions. First, as the pandemic shock hit, policymakers were quick to provide fiscal support to avoid deep scarring from the crisis. Still, forecasts projected some scarring, and output gap projections for 2021 foresaw a large contraction in economic activity compared with potential. Only in retrospect did it become clear that the output slump, relative to potential, was not as dire. Most world economies—almost 80 percent of world GDP—are now known to have had smaller output gaps than projected in early 2021, an indication that the rapid recovery in demand exceeded expectations.
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Second, the strong demand recovery met highly strained supply chains. Supply chain bottlenecks are normally caused by either demand or supply shocks, rarely a combination of the two.
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Third, the demand-supply imbalances were amplified by the shift in demand from services to goods during the early lockdown period as the leisure and hospitality sector mostly ceased functioning. This temporarily reversed a trend seen over the past couple of decades of goods inflation that was lower than services inflation.
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Fourth, unprecedented labor market tightness, which persists to this day in some advanced economies, confounded some of the previous factors. Measured by the ratio of vacancies to unemployment, labor markets have been particularly tight in Australia, Canada, the UK, and the US, significantly correlating with the magnitude of these countries’ core inflation forecast errors.
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One peculiar feature of the policy response to the pandemic in 2020 was the aggressive fiscal stimulus, which according to some observers resembled wartime spending. Importantly, this stimulus was part of the forecasters’ information set at the time. Our analysis shows that the size of the COVID-19 fiscal stimulus packages announced by different governments in 2020 correlates positively with core inflation forecast errors in advanced economies in 2021.

PerpetualDiscounts now yield 6.31%, equivalent to 8.20% interest at the standard equivalency factor of 1.3x. Long corporates yielded 5.25% on 2023-2-24 and since then the closing price has changed from 14.72 to 14.74, an increase of 13bp in price, with a Duration of 12.20 (BMO doesn’t specify whether this is Macaulay or Modified Duration; I will assume Modified) which implies a decline in yield of about 1bp since 2/24 to 5.24%, so the pre-tax interest-equivalent spread (in this context, the “Seniority Spread”) has widened slightly (and perhaps spuriously) to about 295bp from the 290bp reported February 22.

Mixed news on the economy:

On Tuesday, Statistics Canada said real gross domestic product was unchanged in the fourth quarter of 2022 after five consecutive quarters of growth.
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After two quarters of record inventories, businesses accumulated less inventories in the fourth quarter, weighing significantly on real GDP growth.

Real business investment also declined for a third consecutive quarter as higher interest rates weakened housing investment in 2022.

In December, the economy contracted by 0.1 per cent as goods-producing industries declined.
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A preliminary estimate from Statistics Canada suggests the economy bounced back in January, posting 0.3 per cent growth in real GDP.

Last month, the economy added 150,000 jobs, suggesting there’s still steam on the hiring front.

Economic models are getting more complicated:

But traditional models ignore income and wealth inequalities and assume that what’s good for the typical consumer, as defined by the models, must be good for the broader economy.

A newly developed class of quantitative models is particularly suited to guiding central bankers across this new monetary policy territory, in which the wealth and income distributions are a central consideration. Known as HANK models, they combine heterogeneous agent models (macroeconomists’ workhorse framework for studying income and wealth distributions) with New Keynesian models (the basic framework for studying monetary policy and movements in aggregate demand).

HANK models impart new lessons about redistribution and the heterogeneous effects of monetary policy and shed new light on traditional central bank objectives of inflation control and output stabilization. Here are four broad lessons, and some preliminary thoughts, on how HANK models may illuminate our current high-inflation environment.
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The relative size of indirect versus direct channels depends mainly on the aggregate marginal propensity to consume (MPC), which measures how much of a household’s increase in income gets spent and how much is saved. In traditional models, which try to predict the impact of monetary policy on the typical consumer, the MPC is tiny, and consequently the indirect channels are insignificant. HANK models, instead, are built to be consistent with empirical evidence on consumption and saving behavior. Their aggregate MPC is roughly 10 times larger, and thus the various indirect effects dominate the transmission mechanism.
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Many channels of monetary policy have divergent, and sometimes opposing, effects on different households. For example, the direct effects of interest rate changes depend on households’ balance sheets: rate cuts benefit debtors, whose interest payments decrease (such as households with adjustable-rate mortgages) and hurt savers, whose interest income falls. Monetary policy also has heterogeneous effects through its impact on inflation. First, inflation benefits households with lots of nominal debt that is revalued downward. Second, prices rise more for some goods than for others, and different households consume these goods in unequal proportions. Finally, the indirect effects of monetary policy on household disposable income are uneven because some households are more exposed to fluctuations in aggregate economic activity than others.
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By introducing income and wealth inequality, HANK models reestablish a strong link between the two, showing how monetary policy leaves consequential “fiscal footprints.” When the central bank raises interest rates, the treasury’s borrowing costs increase, and the increase must be funded by raising taxes or lowering expenditures, now or in the future, or through future inflation. In HANK models, the details of how and when the government makes up this fiscal shortfall, and which households bear the burden, have a tremendous influence on the overall effects of interest rate hikes.
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Studies of optimal monetary and fiscal policy in HANK models agree that the benefits of aggregate stabilization are dwarfed by the gains from directly alleviating hardship. Optimal policies in HANK models almost always favor redistributing toward hand-to-mouth households in downturns.

One may be tempted to read this as endorsement of using monetary policy to share prosperity and mitigate adversities. But monetary policy is a blunt tool for redistribution or insurance. HANK models tell us that fiscal policy is likely better suited for this task because it can be targeted more precisely to those in need of support.

The BoC has released a Staff Analytical Note by Ramisha Asghar, James Fudurich and Jane Voll titled Firms’ inflation expectations and price-setting behaviour in Canada: Evidence from a business survey:

Implementing effective monetary policy could be more challenging for central banks if firms expect inflation to be high. Tightening monetary policy slows price growth by reducing overall demand, slowing cost increases and raising competitive pressure on firms. But high inflation expectations may encourage large price increases if firms believe that cost growth will remain high after a tightening of monetary policy. If left unchecked, high inflation and elevated inflation expectations could cause a wage-price spiral, anchoring high inflation with harmful economic consequences.1 Because of this risk, understanding whether high inflation expectations are influencing firms’ price-setting behaviour is critical to know for an inflationtargeting central bank.

We investigate whether the recent period of high inflation has changed how Canadian firms set prices for their products and services.
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We find little evidence that firms’ price setting is directly based on high inflation expectations. However, we find that widespread growth in input prices during a period of strong customer demand and reduced competition may have contributed to price increases that were larger than usual. This may explain some of the inflationary pressure observed in 2021 and early 2022. Furthermore, early evidence suggests that in the second half of 2022, price-setting behaviour was gradually returning to pre-pandemic practices, supporting a path for inflation to return to the inflation-control target range. However, the risk remains that high inflation may start to be reflected directly in output prices, which would make it more difficult for monetary policy to reduce inflation.

OMERS had a good year … as long as their valuation of private equity is accurate!

The return OMERS reported for 2022 fell short of an internal benchmark of 7.2 per cent that was set at the end of 2021, when market conditions looked rosier. But it compares favourably with widespread investment losses across the sector after stock and bond prices plunged in the first half of last year.

Last week, Quebec-based pension giant Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec reported a 5.6-per-cent loss in 2022. On average, Canadian defined pension plans performed much worse, with an average annual loss of 10.3 per cent, as measured by a typical mix of publicly held stocks and bonds tracked by Royal Bank of Canada’s RBC I&TS All Plan Universe.
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Over 10 years, OMERS has averaged returns of 7.5 per cent, after expenses, which beat its multiyear benchmark of 7.4 per cent. The fund had assets of $124.2-billion as of Dec. 31, up from $119.5-billion at the end of June.
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Though OMERS suffered losses in its equity and bond portfolios, which fell 5.4 per cent for the year, they were offset by returns from its investments in private assets, which include infrastructure, real estate and private equity.

Private equity investments returned 13.7 per cent, ahead of an internal benchmark of 11.2 per cent, and the companies OMERS invests in through the portfolio broadly held their valuations during the year. Infrastructure investments gained 12.5 per cent, beating a 7.7-per-cent benchmark. And real estate investments gained 13.6 per cent, topping a 7.1-per-cent benchmark.

Canaccord shareholders want more money:

A special committee of Canaccord Genuity Inc.’s CF-T +0.79%increase
board of directors has said a bid to take the independent Canadian investment bank private is too low, after a group of the company’s senior leaders officially launched the takeover attempt early Monday.

More than 50 members of the company’s management team, including chief executive Dan Daviau and board chair David Kassie, first announced plans last month to collectively launch the takeover bid, for $11.25 a share. The management group’s offer values the company at roughly $1.13-billion, despite a subsequent valuation prepared by Royal Bank of Canada RY-T +0.60%increase
for the special committee that found Canaccord to be worth significantly more.

While the offer price represents a nearly 42-per-cent premium over the 20-day average price of Canaccord’s stock as of Jan. 6 – the last trading day before the management group announced its intention to take the company private – it is roughly 32 per cent below Canaccord’s November, 2021, value of $16.52 a share. Canaccord stock has been consistently trading above the proposed offer price since the planned takeover bid was made public on Jan. 9, suggesting investors expect the initial offer price to rise.

My Facebook feed lit up today with people as far south as Montana, Wyoming and Illinois posting glorious, once-in-a-lifetime shots of the Aurora Borealis:

Pictures shared online showed a bright green glow that seemed to be radiating from the grassy hilltops of Scotland. Others showed pink shades filling the sky behind the Neolithic site of Stonehenge in England and above the sharp cliffs on the coast of Ireland. The northern lights were seen across Sussex and Wales; above a cemetery; and from bedroom windows, backyards, a university and even planes.

It is quite common for northern lights to be spotted in Scotland and parts of Northern England, but it is much rarer to see them in southern parts of England. The display on Sunday was one of the best in a very long time, according to the BBC’s weather watchers, a crowdsourced weather club.
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The northern lights are produced by charged particles from the sun that hit Earth’s magnetic field. They are generally visible by the poles, but if the geomagnetic storm is particularly strong, the particles can travel farther south, experts told The New York Times this year.

The European Space Agency said that Sunday night, an expulsion of material from the sun arrived at Earth just as a high-speed solar wind stream whipped through the space around our planet.

Here’s one of my favourites, taken last night in Red Lake, Ontario:

So American inflation fears picked up:

Inflation remains stubbornly elevated and unexpectedly picked up in January, a fresh reading of the Fed’s preferred index showed, underscoring the daunting challenge facing central bankers as they try to wrestle price increases back to a normal pace.

After six months of more or less consistently cooling down, the Personal Consumption Expenditures price measure climbed 5.4 percent in January from a year earlier, an unexpected pickup from 5.3 percent the prior month and substantially more than the 5 percent economists had expected.

Even after stripping out food and fuel prices, both of which jump around a lot, the price index climbed by 4.7 percent in the year through last month — also a pickup, and more than expected in a Bloomberg survey of economists.
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Personal spending, which spans both goods and services, climbed by 1.8 percent in January. That compared to a slight 0.1 percent decline in December, and was more than the 1.4 percent increase that economists had anticipated. Even after adjusting for quick inflation, consumer spending rose at a hearty pace last month.

And there was some cheerful historical data put together:

In research released on a day when inflation data showed an unexpected spike, the authors found that over 16 episodes of “disinflation” engineered by central banks in the United States, Germany, Canada and the United Kingdom, “we find no instance in which a significant central bank-induced disinflation occurred without a recession.”

The researchers included Brandeis International Business School professor Stephen Cecchetti, who is a former top economist at the Bank for International Settlements; Michael Feroli, chief economist at J.P. Morgan; and Columbia Business School professor Frederic Mishkin, who is a former Fed governor and long-time research collaborator with former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke.

The findings were presented on Friday at a conference organized by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and drew pushback from Fed officials who reviewed and commented on it.

“I don’t see that we have to have this trade-off between labour and price stability. I am greedy,” Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester said in remarks to CNBC.

In a paper issued in response to the research, she argued that the recessions associated with past disinflation may have been the result of central banks tightening policy more than necessary, not that a recession was needed to bring price increases into line.

“The implication is that policy-makers need to be attentive to the lagged effects of policy actions as they bring inflation down,” Mester said.

And the BoC has released a Staff Analytical Note by Cyrus Minwalla, John Miedema, Sebastian Hernandez and Alexandra Sutton-Lalani titled A central bank digital currency for offline payments:

• An offline central bank digital currency (CBDC) is a digital complement to bank notes. It enables transactions without the internet while still allowing online purchases when internet connectivity is available.
• The design of an offline CBDC depends on the duration of the offline period. Intermittent offline refers to a temporary internet outage, such as that caused by a failure of telecommunications infrastructure. Extended offline refers a lengthy and indeterminate outage, likely caused by a storm or other weather event. It also refers to the situation in remote regions that do not have reliable or affordable internet.
• Regardless of the length of the offline period, an offline CBDC must be spent or transferred using a digital device—for example, a smartphone with a custom application, or a purpose-designed universal access device (UAD).
• An offline CBDC offers users benefits such as enhanced resilience and better accessibility features. It could also preserve the privacy typically associated with offline payments.
• To minimize the risk of theft or loss, an offline CBDC may require secure hardware with controls to guard against unauthorized tampering, as well as a user-specific personal identification number (PIN), password or biometric authentication stored on the device itself.
• A balance must be struck between compliance, security requirements and user needs. A suitable balance may be defined by optimally selecting limits on holdings, transaction amounts and the duration of offline functionality. Adopting a security posture in terms of limits, controls and functionality, where risks are sufficiently mitigated, is still a challenge for technology available today.