Vancouver gold show & general update
The Vancouver gold show was this weekend. Sadly, the freebies were scant this time around, even worse than during the “great lamentation” of mid-2005. The most creative one was from a company doing work in Australia, giving away monogrammed boomerangs. (Made in China, of course.)
Intriguingly, the free plastic bags featured additives from local company epi; they’re supposed to disintegrate the plastic into powdered pellets, over the course of a few months. I’d run into epi at an environmental show a few years back; they seem to’ve made some progress getting their products out there. It’ll be interesting to follow their business arc over the next few years.
A financial blog I RSS to (Mish’s blog on the sidebar list) recently got named one of Time Magazine’s best financial blogs. Mish has been in the “deflation is coming” camp; his near-term economic prediction — channelling Clubber Lang of Rocky III — calls for pain.
He’s been irksomely correct on the path of commodity prices (to the chagrin of my trading accounts, which lost one “significant figure” late last year). Come to think of it, my high school physics teacher — whom I ran into at last year’s gold show — was right on that one, too.
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My general take on the “tax cuts vs. spending” debate is that, while tax cuts may work better during most economic circumstances, as people spend more money… when things are as falling-off-a-cliff as they are now, tax cuts will go towards paying down debt or hoarding savings, neither of which directly spurs economic activity. Such panics tend to increase demand for gold. 
And guns. 
(Gold’s up about 40% from its October lows, and is at all-time non-inflation-corrected highs, in Canadian dollars. Note though, that buying stuff when it’s at all-time highs is about the surest way to lose money, as investors in Canadian tech companies that shall remain unnamed, learned, ’round about 2000. )
While the country may or may not be in a recession, it’s useful to keep in mind that due to population increase (1% per year) and productivity improvements (perhaps 1% per year), Canada needs GDP growth of about 2% to maintain constant rates of employment. Consequently, the real measure of Canadian economic hardship isn’t whether there’s growth or contraction in the economy, but rather growth or contraction relative to the figure of +2%.