By: Terence Corcoran:
Give Jim Flaherty high marks for rhetorical restraint: The words “shovel” and “ready” do not make it into the Finance Minister’s budget speech and appear only once in his massive 360-page budget plan. That’s where restraint ends, however.
Otherwise, there’s a shovel on almost every page. Within weeks, all Canadian taxpayers can expect delivery of summary budget documents accompanied by a shovel with a tag that says: Dig a hole, throw in $85-billion, and then hope you can get out of it when its all over, sometime in 2014, unless the fiscal winds shift and it gets deeper and you have to dig some more. Continue Reading »
Just like on the good old WWE grunt ’n groan Battles Royale of good vs. evil on TV Wrestling, we’ve got a knock down drag out tussle over our Canadian banks’ lending practices, at this time of financial stress and market illiquidity. It seems that the Canadian banks are not following the government’s script of cranking out bank loans to whatever customers come along, creditworthy or otherwise.
In the one corner is the tough guy team of Finance Minister Jim Flaherty and Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney (do I hear a chorus of boos?). And in the other corner is the masked duo of the Rating Agencies (read S&P, Moody’s, DBRS), and the Regulators (read OSFI), both of whom believe in sound lending practices, and the banks’ fiduciary responsibility to its depositors. At stake in this morality play are nothing less than the banks’ independence in assessing risk, and the shareholders’ confidence in the responsible operation of the banks’ day to day lending activities. Continue Reading »
