The State of Canadian Market

Have you seen the latest Capital Points report by the Scotiabank group? As most of the times, it sumarizes up to date info about various sectors of Canadian economy, showing that on interesting charts, and even more. There's also a comparison of the economy of Canada to that of the US and couple of other countries. So what is the current state and what are some of the expectations according to Scotiabank group? Continue reading to find it out.

The recent state (many of these issues were mentioned in my posts already):

Housing

-the number of unsold new single homes in our country decreased and is now at prerecession levels

-as the interest rates are very low, there is increasing demand for houses

-residential building permits and housing starts in last few weeks improved

-there was an approximately 20 percent in residential permits during the last two months of 2009

Import/Export

-there was a big improvement in Asian import demand

-the leader in import among Asian states is China

-even though the share of Canadian exports to China is not exactly great, but as China says, imports from Canada grew by estimated 20 percent in the last month of 2009 Employment

-in January, 43,000 jobs were created in Canada

-there were 109,000 job gains in our country since April 2009

-during the past six months, 138,000 jobs have been created

-there was growth in total hours worked in 2009, although, if compared to the US, the pace was not very fast

-average hourly wages increased by 1.8 percent from 2008 to 2009, the slowest rise since June 2003

Predictions:

-big increases in housing starts

-growth in new home prices

-improvement of the job market

-improvement in housing construction

-moderate narrowing in the deficit on higher commodity prices

-January housing starts at the level of about 184,000, which is a 3.5% gain from a month before

As mentioned, my short posts did include many of these data, but having them summed up with some new info is great anyway, I think. My article however is just a short review and for all the data about Canada and other states, including graphs you should certainly read the original, 20 pages long report.