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You misunderstand my point. The high loonie makes many Canadian businesses less profitable. They cannot stay in business unless they increase productivity. At the same time we see unemployment going down when one would expect it to rise as Canadian industry adjusts to the higher dollar. Hence my point: productivity must be going up in some places because employment is rising. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Productivity can fall if unemployment is falling because less skilled workers are being hired. This is likely to be happening as money pours into the Canada. I think maybe a better way to say it is that productivity will be going up. This certainly must happen if the loonie is to remain high, unemployment remains low and inflation doesn't rise.

The Canadian dollar has risen 30% against the US dollar in the last 4 years yet unemployment is at a record low. Productivity must be going up somewhere to cause that effect. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> The loonie rising is a function of excessive monetary growth in the US, sounder fiscal policy in Canada, and high demand for Canadian raw materials. It has nothing to do with productivity in Canada.

The Canadian dollar has risen 30% against the US dollar in the last 4 years yet unemployment is at a record low. Productivity must be going up somewhere to cause that effect. <{POST_SNAPBACK}> inflation rates have gone up because of the gas prices - that explains the fall in unemployment rates <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Standards of living certainly are not dropping in the States. I sure would like to see statistics on Canada though.

Canada's productivity growth has been abysmal as of late. From today's Globe

This is false. Finding and development costs for American oil companies have risen from about $7 per barrel five years ago to $12 per barrel today. Oil companies are increasing F&D costs because with the price of crude trippling, companies are exploring more marginal projects. Second, oil is a commodity. Competition is huge. The oil industry to not earn its cost of capital from 1982 to 1997, then broke even from 1997-2001. Refining capacity has not been taken out. What has happened is that there have been no new refiners in the US built over the past 25 years. However, many refiners have had upgrades, which adds incremental capacity. And refining has been an even worse business than exploration and production over the past 3 decades. Here's the IEA's long-term forecast. They estimate that $17 trillion will have to be spent to increase oil production to necessary levels over the next 25 years. I would say that $17 trillion is not "small"

Venezuela is producing about 2.6 million barrels of oil per day. However, they were producing 3.3 million a decade ago. Chavez still claims they are producing that much but oil analysts don't believe it. Little capital has gone into PDVSA and many technical professionals have left because Chavez has purged the company and replaced them with cronies.

You have to have a Green Card for 5 years before you can apply for US citizenship. Green Cards can come through work, family, investment, as a refugee or through the lottery. Most people do not get it through the lottery. Green Cards are divied out based on country of origin. Citizens of Canada have the second highest allotment behind Ireland (the Irish can thank Ted Kennedy for that) and receive something like 7% of all Green Cards issued. Because some countries get more allocated than others, they are not included in the lottery, i.e. Canada. However, every decade or so, Canada is included in the lottery.

A couple of years ago, a Belgian maker of appliances tried to shut down a plant in northern France. The workers occupied the plant and took members of management hostage. So the government sent in a mediator, who was also promptly taken hostage. Chirac recently warned Hewlett Packard that they cannot make any job cuts in France. This helps explain why economic and job growth has been so weak in that country.

World Bank report Link

Remainder of post removed due to copyright infringment. http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/conte...06821_mz054.htm

I'm sure the French thought that too. THIS IS AN EXAMPLE OF THE FRENCH SOCIAL-MARKET DIRIGISTE MODEL! Is this statement unfair? Probably, at least somewhat. But is it any more unfair when sanctimonious Europeans point to America after riots or screw-ups in disaster relief as examples of what Anglo-American capitalism has wrought?

Europe, the planet's open-air museum. http://commonsensewonder.com/mtarchives/007766.shtml

Yet Argentina is going back to the IMF While we're ripping the IMF, lets also not forget that IMF successfully bailed out Uruguay and Brazil in 2003, halting the contagion everyone was expecting after Argentina collapsed. We were all waiting especially for Brazil to go bust, but it didn't happen. Now Brazillian bonds look mighty tempting right here.

My facts are correct. From someone who has connections to the World Bank and the IMF, I can assure you that the IMF wasn't trying to screw Argentina. That does NOT mean that the policy was correct. Understand that. There were several tranches of debt leant to the Argentine government that should not have been. But the IMF desperately wanted Argentina to succeed. I have no problems with people who do not conform to my preferred views. I just prefer them to be credible.

Yet the highest rated companies and countries in the world are those with the lowest debt. They lenders are most interested in lending to the rich! Investment banks trip over these borrowers to lend to them because they know their capital is secure. Your example of the usurious lender is not quite that simple. Rates are priced up and down the risk curve. The higher the risk, the higher the rate and vice-versa. Most capital is not lended out to the riskiest tranches of the market.

It may be true that some of the people who work there are more book smart. And it is probably a valid criticism that the IMF should have more staff on the ground in the countries to which they lend. But they aren't supposed to have an equal spread of personal beliefs across the political spectrum. They are supposed to be highly trained economists and financiers. Most economists are not on the left-wing part of the spectrum. You don't see many economists coming out and supporting the NDP for example. Now, that doesn't mean that the IMF should be dogmatically right-wing either. What they are supposed to be are highly competent professionals. And if there are "left-wing" ideas that can be incorporated into whatever rescue-program the IMF is proposing that are helpful, then those ideas should go into the package. For example, when the IMF was putting together a loan deal for Argentina in 2002, one of the proposals was to cut government spending dramatically. However, the bond market saw that as driving a recessionary economy even deeper into recession and bid the bonds down, not up as the IMF thought the bond market would respond since the government cuts would not bring growth up to the levels required to get Argentina out of its debt spiral.

And yet, the Argies are back for more! Don't they learn their lesson? Don't they listen to the anti-globalization types? Don't they know what's good for them? http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/americas/11/...mmit/index.html

First, Lulu is running what could best be described as a centre-right government. For God's sakes, Brazil is running a better fiscal policy than the United States! Brazillian bonds yielding 19% and paying off debt look mightily intriguing! Here's a paragraph from Thursday's Wall Street Journal, which best describes what is happening in Latin America (pA10) The fact that Brazil is shying away from FTAA does not necessarily mean that they are against it. The US Congress was shying away from CAFTA until they (ridiculously) won concessions for agricultural lobbies. On Argentina, the problems with Argentina weren't with the IMF, with the exception that the IMF kept lending the country money long past when it looked they were insolvent and were about to bust anyways. The problems in Argentina were due to large borrowings by the provinces and to an inflexible exchange rate regime. The IMF backed Argentina's convertability scheme and the policies that caused Argentina to take off in the first place. The IMF's biggest sin was that they should have cut Argentina off sooner than they did. In fact, a consortium of private lenders met with Argentina and told the country to default - in effect, the lenders were telling the Argentine government to not pay them back - but the country didn't listen and kept going back to the IMF to fund their spending that they couldn't get under control. And because of political pressure to not allow Argentina to default, which they did anyways, the US government kept pressing the IMF to give Argentina more money. Trying to avoid a default is hardly a recipe for nefarious economic imperalism. If you are interested in knowing the exact criteria how countries were defined as globalizing in the study, go to the IMF web page and find the paper. Or call the authors. They'll tell you. Here's the phone number for the IMF (202) 623-7000 Ask for David Dollar or Aart Kraay. But the Readers Digest version is that these were the countries that liberalized trade and capital flows. As for Saul, he's an utter fraud concerning economics. I read Voltaires Bastards, and he kept making all these nonsensical statements about how the West has been in a Depression since the late 1960s, with nary a number to back him up. He also wrote that inflation is caused by mergers. This man is not a serious person on this subject.

Yet deBeers is considered by law a monopolist in the United States and its executives cannot set foot in the country. However, America is conspiring to keep the prices of diamonds high, which aids the monopolists who are deemed illegal in the United States.

No, but I did meet a couple of guys who served in the Wehrmacht. Nice guys, loved beer. Your point? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> My point is that people make broad-based statements about institutions, i.e. serving a "far right-wing agenda" without actually knowing what the people who work at these institutions actually do. The IMF and the World Bank employee hundreds of PhDs from all around the world, trained at the best universities all around the world. They are incredibly bright, highly competent people. Saying they are enforcing some nefarious right-wing agenda is tantamount to saying that all liberal arts professors in all universities are promoting a communist agenda. That doesn't mean the institutions are above criticism - you might be surprised that there are a lot on the right who are critics as well. Nor does it mean they don't make mistakes. And its fair to ask whether or not they should even exist at all. But to say that they're tools for a far right-agenda is just silly. Its hard to take these critics seriously.

For all you critics of the IMF and the World Bank who think like this, do you know anyone who works are these institutions? Do you know anyone has in the past? Have you ever had a conversation with any of these people about what they actually do? There is a lot to be critical about these two institutions for a variety of reasons, but "the far-right" is not, and has never been a fan of the IMF and the World Bank.

IMF are pawns of US diplomatic and economic interests. The IMF has put poor countries into precautious positions leaving them indebted thru their good bleeding hearts bail-outs http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/free/imf/unrest.htm http://www.nadir.org/nadir/initiativ/agp/f...imf/protest.htm I mean what is the IMF doing in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq – helping them to purchase weapons I suppose or creating environments necessary for war? <{POST_SNAPBACK}> Sure, that's what the IMF is doing. Weaponizing everyone. Here's a good article in reply to the World Development Movement http://www.globalizationinstitute.org/publ...radejustice.pdf

Oh right. The IMF is "lying". Those couple hundred PhDs in economics, mathematics and statistics are pawns doing false statistical analysis to keep the poor down. So the "only" countries that globalization has helped are the two with "only" 2.5 billion people. Quite the failure that. Of course, Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Chile, etc. are all failures, since they don't make your list of two. Africa is a failure not because it hasn't gotten wealthier - it has as I pointed out. Rather, its because they haven't grown as fast as everywhere else. Here are the 24 countries that the IMF defined as "globalizing" I posted earlier. Of these, 18 of them saw standards of living rise faster than the developed world from 1980-2000. Argentina Bangladesh Brazil China Colombia Costa Rica Côte d'Ivoire Dominican Republic Haiti Hungary India Jamaica Jordan Malaysia Mali Mexico Nepal Nicaragua Paraguay Philippines Rwanda Thailand Uruguay Zimbabwe

More on Globalization http://www.cis.org.au/Events/JBL/JBL05.htm