Skip to main content

National Post: Canada's economy shrank in Q2/2011


OTTAWA – The Canadian economy shrank in the second quarter, the first quarterly fall since the 2008-09 recession, largely due to temporary factors such as Japan’s earthquake and tsunami, Statistics Canada said on Wednesday. Real gross domestic product fell at an annualized rate of 0.4% from the first quarter, worse than the median forecast of a 0.1% increase in a Reuters survey of economists. The first quarter grew by 3.6%. However, most economists expected a rebound in the third quarter from the temporary disruptions in the second. If this is the case, Canada would escape the technical definition of recession — two quarters of negative growth. The decline was marked by a 2.1% fall in export volume. This, in turn, was influenced by a supply disruption in the auto industry caused by the earthquake and tsunami, as well as wildfires and maintenance shutdowns that helped cut oil and gas extraction by 3.6%. Business investment, housing investment and consumer spending were all up in the quarter. For the month of June, Statscan said real GDP rose by 0.2% in June after a 0.3% fall in May, with the auto and gas industries posting rebounds.
© Thomson Reuters 2011


Don't need to say much more -- hate reprint, but anything else would just be a rewrite -- which is lamer.  Bottom line is that Canada's Q1/11 +1% performance was followed by zero or close to zero growth in Q2.  The question is what will happen in the second half of 2011, there the bets are off, housing in Canada is slowing, partly has a result of more stringent mortgage rules (30 year mortgage, sensitivity to higher mortgage rates).  Finally, is the health of our No 1 export market:  America.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ok so I lied...a little (revised)

When we began looking at farming in 2013/14 as something we both wanted to do as a "second career" we invested time and money to understand what sector of farming was profitable.  A few things emerged, First, high-quality, source-proven, organic farm products consistently have much higher profit margins.  Secondly, transformation accounted for nearly 80% of total profits, and production and distribution accounted for 20% of profits: Farmers and retailers have low profit margins and the middle bits make all the money. A profitable farm operation needs to be involved in the transformation of its produce.  The low-hanging fruits: cheese and butter.  Milk, generates a profit margin of 5% to 8%, depending on milk quality.  Transformed into cheese and butter, and the profit margin rises to 40% (Taking into account all costs).  Second:  20% of a steer carcass is ground beef quality.  The price is low, because (a) a high percentage of the carcass, and (b)...
Post a Comment
Read more

Spray painting Taylor Swift G650 aircraft (updated)

 First, a bit of paint will not harm anyone.  These climate activities are going to learn two things in the next few days:  (1) Trespassing at an airport is a felony almost anywhere in the world.  That means criminal prosecution.   (2) removing paint from an aircraft is expensive.   So these climate activists are about to find out the reach of the British criminal system and it will not be pleasant, the UK has very strict laws about that, I would be surprised if cleaning the aircraft of all the paint will cost less than $100,000.     I am sure that when they planned (premeditation) this little show they had a very valid logic to doing this.  Tonight, they are probably realizing the depth of their troubles.   I understand that in the UK it's a minimum one-year jail sentence.    Also, good luck travelling with a criminal trespass charge against you.  I am relatively certain that the airline industry will ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Janet Yellen from China supporter to Hawk...

There is rarely serious news in the world these days, it seems that most newspapers are filled with headlines and little else, and then Ms Yellen went to China.  Secretary Yellen has long been known in the Biden administration as the voice of moderation when dealing with China, yet as her trip which concluded yesterday a hawk was born:  She warned the Chinese against dumping goods in the United States.    fighting words! The American administration is very concerned about the lack of Chinese domestic consumption.   Even before the COVID-19 epidemic, there were already the beginning signs of a slowdown, automobile sales were off.   China is facing domestic deflation (a clear sign of collapsing demand) China imports few consumer goods, they import raw materials and intermediary goods.   It seems that the American administration is concerned that the Chinese administration will dump consumer goods abroad to keep its manufacturing machinery ...
Post a Comment
Read more