Le chargé de cours et professeur émérite en sciences économiques Steve Ambler signe un texte dans le Globe and Mail en compagnie de Jeremy Kronick de l’Institut C.D. Howe. On Wednesday, in a move anticipated by financial markets, the Bank of Canada cut its policy rate by a quarter-percentage-point to 2.25 per cent. On the basis of economic data alone, this was a tough call. While the Governor Tiff Macklem helped shape market expectations this time, we believe the future path of the bank’s policy rate remains murky. Start with the data. Headline inflation jumped to 2.4 per cent in September, above the 2-per-cent target for the first time since March. Core inflation measures such as CPI-trim and CPI-median – which remove volatile components in the consumer price index – remain stuck above 3 per cent. In September, the economy surprisingly added 60,000 jobs, with the net gain driven entirely by full-time jobs. With these numbers, a pause in cuts would have been justified.
