Someone gets smart: Instead of dropping its Canadian prices, a U.S. magazine publisher has quietly removed the American price for its magazines — leaving only the Canadian price on the cover. You go, Hearst Magazines! What the market will bear! The hyperbolic reaction ranges from calling the move a “shell game” (The Star headline) tocontinue reading

Pace the Globe and Mail’s John Partridge, a lovely man, a lede like this always makes me question whatever follows: You should probably ignore all the headlines you have seen shrieking about the vast amount of cross-border shopping — physical and online — triggered by the soaring Canadian dollar. Really? Why? Because Stats Can sayscontinue reading

From CBS Marketwatch:  World of Warcraft Visa. This comes from the online role-playing game World of Warcraft and gives cardholders points toward free game time. For every 1,500 points earned, the cardholders gets one free month of play time.

Oh, I do love a good theory. Especially when it’s clearly spelled out in a way that makes it easy to poke holes in. So thanks to BMO Nesbitt Burns’ Doug Porter for his irresistible musings on decoupling: Despite the tight linkages, there are four reasons to believe domestic growth will fare better than thecontinue reading

From Saturday’s Financial Post: It was one of those rare coincidences which cause the view to completely change. The same week in early November that the loonie hit a record high of US$1.10, Canada reported a record quarterly drop in its trade surplus — it fell by more than a third to $10.7-billion in thecontinue reading

There’s usually a lag between economic cycles in the US and in Canada — a year and a half to two years seems to be the accepted lag time for real estate — which is why I’m constantly surprised to see economists committing things like this to paper — exclamation points and all: While somecontinue reading