Rate hikes by the Reserve Bank of Australia have led some analysts to wonder if the Bank of Canada will be soon following suit. David A. Rosenberg, Chief Economist & Strategist at Gluskin Sheff, is not one of them.

Despite making an average $500,000 a year (in today’s prices), the great novelist and playwright F. Scott Fitzgerald, never was able to put money aside. He and his wife thought the solution was to budget, to prepare a complete record of what they had spent running the household. But somehow, ...

In Thomas Hardy's masterpiece of a novel written in the 1880s,  The Life and Death of the Mayor of Casterbridge, the destinies of the two main characters, the tragic Michael Henchard and the triumphant Donald Farfrae, essentially rested on the outcome of their trading in commodities.

Today’s release of the Teranet-National Bank National Composite House Price Index shows a vigorous gain of 2% in Canadian resale house prices from July to August. The national house price index (based on six cities) has now risen four straight months (and likely will show further increases in September and ...

An International Monetary Fund (IMF) working paper released this month asks: Is the Canadian Housing Market Overvalued? The study concludes that house prices in Alberta and British Columbia are now only 8% overvalued while house prices in Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan are close to equilibrium (as of end of the second ...

My previous post ended with the thought that a flat tax might be a better system than the monstrosity of the present. I was going to do a write-up on it but some readers wrote in recently and did a better job expounding on flat taxes than I would have ...

The kerfuffle over recently proposed TFSA changes raises once again the question of whether or not our tax system is way too complicated with its plethora of differential tax rates and exemptions. Concerns include:

An email from David K. of Toronto nudges me to post on a point I had thought to include in yesterday’s column on short selling leveraged ETFs – but left on the cutting room floor. It concerns the strategy of shorting leveraged ETFs and the distinction between historical and future ...

Recent proposed changes to TFSAs are creating a bit of a stir in the media and blogosphere. What’s all the fuss about?

F. Scott Fitzgerald, author of The Great Gatsby and This Side of Paradise, was a successful writer in the 1920s and 1930s who earned $500,000 (U.S.) a year in today’s prices. Yet he and his family could never seem to save despite concerted efforts to budget and “accumulate capital.”  William J. ...