Canada's Quiet Economic Strength
In the past year, distance from the U.S. has proved a great insulator from economic pain. China and Australia, literally on the other side of the globe, are humming along, while Mexico is suffering from a decline in U.S. imports. But our NAFTA neighbor to the north, Canada, has emerged from the morass in better shape than any developed economy. Since its brief recession ended this summer, Canada has been creating jobs (31,000 in September). The Canadian dollar--the loonie--is soaring against our dollar. "There is a buzz in Canada right now, which is as far apart as you could ever be from what's happening south of the border," said David Rosenberg, chief economist of Toronto-based asset manager Gluskin Sheff.
While housing prices in Canada grew exuberant, lending standards never did. Canadian home buyers had to make down payments, funky interest-only loans were nowhere to be seen, and banks kept their leverage ratios in check. The result: mortgage default rates have been low, and no large Canadian bank has failed. The World Economic Forum ranks Canada's as the world's most sound banking system. And while exports of manufactured goods to the U.S. have been hit, Canada's huge resource industries--oil, natural gas, agriculture, metals--have benefited from China's continued growth. The exposure of Canada's economy to the commodity sector is three times more intense than America's. Add in robust capital inflows and a recovering housing market, and, strange as it seems to say, Canada is hot.
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Daniel Gross is one of the most widely read financial and economic writers working today. He is a senior editor at Newsweek, where he writes the "Contrary Indicator" column. He writes the twice-weekly "Moneybox" column for Slate, which also appears on Newsweek.com.
Before joining Newsweek in the spring of 2007, Mr. Gross wrote the "Economic View" column in the New York Times, was a contributing writer to New York, and contributed regularly to magazines such as Fortune and Wired. From 1998-2007, Gross served as the editor of STERNBusiness, a semi-annual academic magazine on economics and management published by the New York University Stern School of Business.
A native of East Lansing, Michigan, Mr. Gross graduated from Cornell University in 1989, with degrees in government and history, and holds an A.M. in American history from Harvard University (1991). He worked as a reporter at The New Republic and Bloomberg News, and has contributed hundreds of features, news articles, book reviews and opinion pieces to over 60 magazines and newspapers. Areas of expertise include: economic and tax policy, the links between business and politics, the rise of the investor class, the culture of Wall Street, and business history.
He is the author of four books: "Forbes Greatest Business Stories of All Time" (Wiley, 1996), which was a New York Times Business bestseller and a finalist for the Financial Times "Lex" award, given to the best business history book of 1996. Translations have been published in Spanish, German, Czech, Polish, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese, Turkish, and Japanese; "Bull Run: Wall Street, the Democrats, and the New Politics of Personal Finance" (PublicAffairs, 2000); "The Generations of Corning: The Life and Times of an American Company," co-authored with Davis Dyer, (Oxford University Press, 20010; and "Pop! Why Bubbles Are Great for the Economy," (HarperCollins, May 2007).
Mr. Gross appears frequently in the media. A regular guest on CNBC, MSNBC, and National Public Radio, he has also appeared on CNN, Fox News Channel, The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, Bloomberg Television, C-SPAN, BBC, and Reuters TV, and on more than 50 radio programs and talk shows.
Mr. Gross lives in Westport, Conn., with his wife and two children.
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