What are the opportunities for payments providers?
The complexity of the purchasing process within the new generation of metaverses, coupled with lingering concerns over many aspects of crypto, are both acting as deterrents to most people entering the newer decentralized, blockchain-enabled, and crypto-based platforms such as Somnium Space and Axie Infinity. So what’s going on, and what are the opportunities for payments…
A monthly report card is just good business
The owner of a $100-million company recently told me he wasn’t sure he understood his financial statements. How could someone build a successful business in less than five years while not understanding how to read a financial statement? Because he’s good at hiring great people, including his chief financial officer (CFO), and has other skills,…
The Bank has one job: to keep inflation around two per cent. It failed
It feels odd to explain this basic principle, but apparently, it’s not obvious to everyone: bonuses and pay raises are for doing a good job. While the Bank of Canada was sowing the seeds of today’s high inflation during the early days of the pandemic, it was also padding its employees’ pockets with bonuses and…
I'm thinking I would have better luck taking my chances with fraudsters
What do we do when efforts to preserve our privacy are more of an intrusion than the potential lack of privacy? Take banks. We can all be the victims of identity theft and fraud. We need to be careful. So do banks. A generation ago, a few pieces of ID got a check cashed. No…
The next few months may only bring stagnation but a full-blown recession is more likely
‘Financial repression’ refers to governments or central banks, such as the Bank of Canada or the U.S. Federal Reserve Board, intervening in financial markets to suppress interest rates. Central banks have been intervening for nearly two years, causing a serious disruption in the financial markets. The official rates of the Bank of Canada and the Federal…
The continued reliance on cash is a symbol of good governance
When I audited an economics class in the Rice University School of Business, the lecturer compared inflation to slow-growing cancer and deflation to a heart attack. The implication was that deflation – declining prices – is fatal and worse than inflation. This Keynesian fearmongering, which empowers central banks to water down currencies, is common but…
Interest rates will rise dramatically to compensate financial institutions with effects lasting for years
It’s not entirely clear whether the Canadian and the global economies are heading for a new inflationary era. It may turn out that inflation is not only elevated from recent negligible levels, but escalates, steadily at first, and then dramatically, as it did in the 1960s until the early 1980s. If it does, the havoc…
Canada’s 2050 goal to achieve net-zero emissions might look good on paper, but it will harm investors, companies, employees and households
Canada’s policy to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050 necessitates divesting from fossil fuels. There’s just one problem: massive outstanding loans from banks to the oil and gas industries. The oil and gas sector makes up more than 10 per cent of the Canadian economy, and abolishing it, gradually or otherwise, would take its toll. Canadian…
The decentralization genie is out of the bottle
Underneath all the media brouhaha and institutional focus on bitcoin, a struggle is brewing in the crypto world: which altcoin will pick up the baton? A fierce competition is underway for the podium, with Ethereum having a clear first-mover advantage. Bitcoin, as economists and investors such as Larry Summers and Ray Dalio have come around…
We must free internal trade, reform banking and telecommunications and increase incentives for retraining
By Sara MacIntyre and Marco Navarro-Genie Frontier Centre for Public Policy Canadians want change. It’s been more than a generation since we’ve felt the kind of overreaching power of government we’ve experienced in the past year. Daily freedoms have been curtailed, millions of livelihoods impaired, savings drained and countless fines and arrests created for new…