But their banking system is sound.
Like talking about how good the person looked at his funeral?
Karim writes:
Another downbeat number with the unemployment rate rising to an 8mth high of 7.6% (from 7.5%).
Total employment up 2.3k, with full-time jobs -3.6k after -21.7k the prior month.
In the past 5mths the unemployment rate in Canada has risen by 0.4% while the U.S. has fallen 0.6% (subject to today’s #)-a large move in a short time.
Chart below shows the recent divergence in Conference Board confidence surveys for Canada (blue) and U.S. (red).

New numbers are encouraging
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-02-03/payrolls-in-u-s-jumped-243-000-in-january-unemployment-rate-drops-to-8-3-.html
Jobs up 243,000 and unemployment rate to 8.3%
Conservatives seem to think that confidence is a product of “incentives”–i.e. bribes from the public purse. They do seem ideally suited for a virtual world with which reality never intersects.
I would put unemployment at like 20% but we all know the real world has nothing to do with it
And yet no sign from Harper or finance minister Flaherty that they are not going forward with $8 billion in cuts to the govt. We in government like to call it “the Jim Flaherty cut jobs to create jobs strategy”. All the usual nonsense about ‘have to stop using the credit card’ and time to ‘tighten our belts’ up here. Insanity prevails.
Great stuff — it cannot be highlighted enough.
thanks!