Month: April 2009

#pmharper update on 12seconds.tv

I am. (Go ahead and watch and then come back)

Not sure how 'rich' the experience or information on this service will be but I'm game to try it out. Thoughts? Suggestions? The video here is shot off the built-in iSight on my Apple MacBook and that's me sitting at my desk in the nation's capital.

The rules for 12seconds.tv are pretty basic: You get 12 seconds! Whether you use all 12 or not, it's a 12-second clip. That's mighty tight. When I was at CTV, I usually got 15-18 seconds for my stand-up at the end. CBC reporters are allowed to drone on a little longer, maybe up to 20 seconds. But 12 seconds? Man, that's tight!

I'm posting these 12seconds videos to Twitter. My Twitter app – TweetDeck — allows one to keep a separate window open for 12seconds.

For the first time since 1955, the so-called “headline” rate of inflation in the United States fell below zero. Prices in America last month were, on average, 0.4 per cent lower than they were in the same month last year and 0.1 per cent lower than they were in the previous month. Core inflation was up though experts believe core inflation is about to weaken as well.

Most economists will tell you that negative inflation or deflation is the worst thing that can happen to an economy. No one, so far as I can tell, though is sounding the alarm bells about this trend or that it will last long.

“We think this is the beginning of a short-term stint of negative rates,” writes Dawn Desjardins, deputy chief economist at the Royal Bank. “In the near-term, the growing economic slack will likely continue to pressure prices lower. However, we do not expect a period of sustained negative inflation rates but rather expect the headline rate to move back above zero later this year as the impact of the Obama Administration's fiscal stimulus package and extremely accommodative monetary policy support a return to positive growth and shore up inflation expectations.”

Millan Mulraine, an economic strategist at TD Bank, writes: “With the bargaining power of workers limited by deteriorating labour market conditions, and the pricing power of businesses continuing to be curtailed by the weakening domestic economy, we expect U.S. consumer prices to weaken even further in the coming months. Nevertheless, the weakness in consumer prices is unlikely to descend into a deflationary spiral as we expect prices to recover later this year.”

Geoffrey K. Pullum, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, leaves no doubt as to where he stands on Strunk and White:

The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students' grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.

The authors won't be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte's Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk's death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.

This was most unfortunate for the field of English grammar, because both authors were grammatical incompetents.

A state-owned Russian venture capital fund is poised to pump millions of dollars into Canada's fledgling nanotechnology industry.

Senior officials from the Russian Corporation of Nanotechnologies — which calls itself RUSNANO — were in Windsor, Toronto, and Ottawa last week meeting with scientists and entrepreneurs, as well as provincial and federal officials, as part of their global search for promising nanotechnology companies that need some seed money.

“What we saw we liked,” said Alexander Losyukov, RUSNANO's deputy director general for international co-operation, in an interview in Ottawa. “Scientists are getting engaged.”

Losyukov and other senior fund officials have also travelled to Germany, Israel, Finland, the U.S. and elsewhere as they look for startups in which to invest. With $5 billion U.S. to work with, RUSNANO is one of the largest technology capital funds on the planet.

Losyukov said it has identified more than 100 Canadian firms involved in commercial development of nanotechnology.

Later this spring, fund officials in Moscow will decide which firms or startups it wants to back. The fund's minimum investment in any of these firms will be $10 million U.S. [Red the rest of the story]

It's been 92 years since Canadian troops knocked the Germans off of France's Vimy Ridge, at a terrible cost in blood, limbs, and lives to both sides. I disagree with those in the PMO who say it was a “decisive battle” that help define the course of the First World War. But I, and many historians agree with the PMO's statement (not online yet) that, for a young Canada, the battle, which began on Easter Sunday 1917, was a monumental coming-of-age moment: The first time all four divisions of the Canadian Corps fought together as a single unit — and won a major objective.

One of the best and most emotionally enriching assignments I've ever had in 25 years in this biz was covering the 90th annniversary of this battle. At a ceremony attended by tens of thousands in France, Prime Minister Harper was joined by Queen Elizabeth II, who spoke French on French soil in tribute to Canada, and French Prime Minister Dominique deVillepin, who spoke English (!) on French soil tribute to Canada.

The ceremony was special but so, for me, was Easter Sunday morning. Journalists had been taken up to the Ridge before dawn. There, with only a handful of people around, we watched a magnificent sunrise and reflected on the awful battle and tremendous sacrifices that had happened on that cold, snowy, muddy, deadly morning 90 years ago. Then later, we attended a church service at nearby St.-Martin-de-Vimy and, finally, a celebration of Canada's troops in the town of Arras. Here's a couple of photos I took from that day and more can be found here.

The only good news in Statistics Canada's monthly jobs report was that it was not as grim as some had expected. Still — it was as grim as most expected. More than 61,000 Canadians lost their jobs in March, the fifth month in a row, and our unemployment rate is now 8 per cent.

Dawn Desjardins, the assistant chief economist at the Royal Bank looked at the numbers and says:

The unemployment rate has risen at a staggering pace from a generational low of 5.8% at the beginning of 2008 to 6.6% at the end of the year and 8% at the end of the first quarter of 2009. This pace of increase clearly outflanked the rise in the unemployment rate during the economic slowdown earlier this decade (it increased to 8% from 6.7%) but is less than the 4.8 to 5.8 percentage point increase recorded in the early 1980s and 1990s recessions. That being said, we expect the unemployment rate to continue to move higher in the months ahead given the weak state of the economy and persistent uncertainty in financial markets.

However, with the considerable monetary policy and fiscal stimulus hitting up in Canada, we believe conditions are in place for the economy to start to recover mid-year especially if the nascent signs of stability in the US economic and financial markets build momentum. All eyes are on the Bank's statement on April 21 which will deliver the framework for quantitative and credit easing and we look for policymakers to reiterate their commitment to keeping interest rates low until the economy is growing sufficiently strong to close the output gap and limit downside risks to the inflation outlook.

Here's CIBC World Markets Avery Shenfeld:

We’ve reached much higher jobless rates in past recessions, but the pace of employment losses, with a further 61,000 in March extending a more than 2% drop since October, is consistent with a severe recession.