Always worth noting that there is no “Canadian housing market.” Wildly different trends

FX looking fairly tame so far (for context, a sub-1% move is small in currency markets):

This reminds me of that Frankie Boyle joke about how Americans not only come to your country and kill your people, they also come back twenty years later to make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers sad.

Resetting to a pre-Westphalian mode of warfare may not be entirely unwelcome.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​:

Marko Papic on the other site:

Congratulations to the new Supreme Leader of Iran

Probably irrelevant now that Trump is likely to declare victory, take his toys, and go back to golfing, but crude price exposures have shifted sharply across the major powers in recent years:

What did Churchill say about Russian politics, bulldogs, and rugs?

inside the White House

Having started a war, thus far Trump feels no need to address the American people about his choice, as he works out of a Florida hotel and party space. www.reuters.com/world/iran-c...

N12's front page includes "ח'אמנאי חוסל"

Think this might be misinterpreting something said about hitting his compound in Tehran.

😂 geopolitical edging is exactly what this is. Presumably followed by a big MOP explosion at the end.

This image is going to get a lot of mileage.

Proof that Trump is playing checkers, not chess:

For markets, the usual Middle East reaction could play out tomorrow, but an existential threat to the Iranian regime—one that could lead to economically-damaging reprisals—is not the scenario most investors were pricing in yesterday, meaning the potential for extreme volatility has risen sharply.

In the light of StatCan's upward revisions to real GDP last November, we now see the economy has generally been operating a bit above its pre-pandemic trend line since 2021, although it dipped slightly below it again in 2025 Q4. #cdnecon

HHS nutrition & vaccination policies add up to “Liver, Let Die.”

This is a very good point. Overall Canadian indebtedness is still far higher than in the US, implying long-term structural drag on spending and investment levels (chart ranked by household indebtedness):

The US is truly exceptional in that it has grown more quickly than its advanced-economy counterparts since the pandemic, while also doing far more borrowing. Canada, for all her productivity faults, has generated decent growth while on a more restrained fiscal trajectory:

a lot of U.S. problems are the result of lack of real market competition!

US equity markets have dramatically underperformed their major counterparts since January 2025, and are at the bottom of the league table even if we include the 'Trump bump' in 2024.

Yes, Canadian productivity is terrible and per-capita performance has been weak, but the economy has expanded faster than all of its non-US G7 peers since the pandemic:

Nothing's changed.

This, from @cullenroche.bsky.social on the other site, seems quite plausible. Reducing the economy-of-scale and back-office advantages for established firms could help small-scale innovators emerge and grow much more quickly:

Sounds as if US authorities are leaning toward prohibitions on yield-bearing stablecoins, relegating them to use as payment rails. Stablecoin settlement is faster, but not sure FX spreads can come down much when there’s no incentive for keeping funds on-chain? blog.starpointllp.com/2026/02/no-m...

Someone leaked footage from this encounter:

Jings! I had no idea this stuff existed. To think, all these years I’ve been wasting my money on booze.

Napoleon III was probably the first man to begin his career with a dashing coup and end it in an unremarkable Sedan.

*chef’s kiss*

Amazing, but we really needed this during the euro crisis for Evans-Pritchard headlines.

Came across the phrase "cognitive DDOS" to describe our present culture. Understood instantly what it meant.

It’s a Golf of Bonkin’ incident.

1/2 The US “exorbitant privilege”—its capacity for earning excess returns through the recycling of low-cost foreign investment—has faded in recent years, with net income flipping negative even as the net international investment position has worsened:

Thought-provoking stuff in this WaPo piece by Ramesh Ponnuru, highlighted by Dominic Pino on the other site (believe neither of them are on here): www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/202...

Just a reminder to anyone trying to keep up with the torrent of trade and tariff news that you might find my trade policy feed useful: bsky.app/profile/simo...

To paraphrase Walter Schiedel, with the rarest of exceptions, great reductions in US trade imbalances were only ever brought forth in times of economic distress:

The role of government in the American economy has expanded vastly since the days of President McKinley, and its obligations have grown faster still. Trump's misplaced nostalgia aside, tariffs simply aren't up to the task of offsetting that reality:

(Almost) needless to say, the US cannot replace income taxes with tariffs. Goods imports are dwarfed by household and corporate income, making a wholesale substitution of one for the other a fiscal impossibility:

Apropos of nothing, I’ve decided to take a mental health for the next two hours

everything you read about AI is someone's FORECAST. To date, there is no evidence it has raised economy-wide productivity or destroyed jobs (even among graduates). Even the impact of the capex on GDP - which is a real thing - has been wildly overstated for the past 12 months

It's not quite a Koo-style "balance sheet recession", but the flow of credit into Canadian households has slowed sharply in line with the post-pandemic sudden stop in speculative real-estate activity:

Currency traders are—thus far—shrugging off turbulence in equity markets:

Brad Setser (sadly not on here), throwing fire in the FT: China is not dumping US Treasuries www.ft.com/content/9ea5...

It is striking that, on all the measures Trump might have cited last April, his trade policy has failed. New substack piece philipcoggan.substack.com/p/trumps-tra...

"no one bets against while collar jobs" is the new "no one bets against the housing market"

FX reserve accumulation was a major force in global markets from the Asian Financial Crisis through to the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis. But net acquisition volumes have since fallen off dramatically, making discussions of "reserve currency" status much less relevant:

Note, however, that the gap between inflation-adjusted prices and incomes has not narrowed entirely, not even close. Imbalances in the Canadian economy are still quite significant: