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ICYMI – Exposing Trump’s Tariff Fraud

ByDoug Anderson Economics, International Relations

The last week and a half have been dominated by Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs. You may recall his charts that showed what they said other countries were charging the US and the lower figure (usually 1/2) that the US was going to charge them.

Except it was all a sham. After some pushback they came up with this equation.

Looks impressive doesn’t it with all those Greek letters. Except it doesn’t have anything to do with tariffs. The equation was cracked by financial journalist James Surowiecki within a few hours and later validated by several other analysts. The equation takes the the US total trade deficit with a given country (Xi – Mi) and divides it by the value of the goods said country exports to the US (Mi).  The other factors were set so they cancel out, and the delta Ti is the supposed tariff rate.… More

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Bring These $$ Home

ByDoug Anderson Canada, Economics, International Relations, Money

Trump has poked the Canadian bear and has unleashed a level of patriotism that we haven’t seen before – perhaps ever.  So while the tariffs may eventually get  withdrawn and things may seem to go back to normal we can never again leave ourselves this vulnerable. We need to harden our economy.

Ironically this situation presents Canada with some incredible opportunities. This current wave of nationalism must be harnessed.

50 years ago the government of Justin’s father Pierre, created the Canada Development Corp in order to stem the tide of foreign ownership of Canadian companies and a similar idea is needed today but for different reasons. The Canada Development Corporation was created to invest in strategic industries in order to increase Canadian ownership. The CDC had some success but the Mulroney government shut it down when they took office in the mid 80s. The problem of foreign ownership is still … More

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Media Madness

ByDoug Anderson Economics, Uncategorized

Following last week’s column on the stock market collapse, I undertook a simple piece of research to find out how significant the “bloodbath” was. I wanted to get a fix on just what proportion of the market participated in the drop in share values. Upskir

Seventy-seven million shares were traded on Black Monday. My initial guess was that that represented a pretty small proportion of the total shares on the market, say 2 – 5%.

I phoned up the Toronto Stock Exchange last Friday to find out the total number of shares listed. I was connected to stats.

They didn’t know – “Try listings.” It was clear that in the two weeks since Black Monday, I was the first person to ask them this question.

Listings said, “Try stats.”

I protested. It was suggested I talk to the supervisor in stats.

Eventually stats came up with the number 28.7 … More