How I’m Interpreting The Rate Announcements

On today’s show we are going to take a look at the Federal Reserve’s announcement on Wednesday of this week. There has been lots covered about this on virtually every news channel.  What I'm covering hopefully is different from what you might be hearing.

All eyes were on the Federal Reserve today. But the Bank of Canada also cut their key lending rate by 0.25% today bringing the Canadian central bank’s rate down to 2.5%. Most Canadian banks followed the rate announcement with a cut to their prime lending rate of 0.25% down to 4.7%. This is the rate that Canadian banks charge to their customers. In the summer of last year, banks were charging 6.7% for loans. Today, that’s 4.7%. This makes a difference. While the news is welcome, This rate cut is a reflection of economic weakness in Canada which has been impacted by the trade war with the US. Canada’s unemployment rate is high at 7.1%.

While the US unemployment rate is officially 4.3%, we have to remember that the BLS has tinkered with the definition of unemployed over the years. They still do report the numbers as they did in the 1970’s and 1980’s. This is the U6 metric which if it were compared to the unemployment rate back then, would be at 8.3% in the US.

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