Typography

Canadians will all know what Canadian Tire Money is, but American and overseas readers might not. Canadian Tire, one of Canada's largest retailers, defies easy categorization, selling everything from tents to lawn furniture to hockey sticks to car tires. Since 1958, it has been issuing something called Canadian Tire Money (see picture above). These paper notes are printed in denominations of up to $2 and are redeemable at face value in kind at any Canadian Tire store. Because there's a store in almost every sizable Canadian town, and the average Canadian make a couple visits each year, Canadian Tire money has become ubiquitous—everyone has some stashed in their cupboard somewhere. Many Canadians are quite fond of the stuff—there's even a collectors club devoted to it. I confess I'm not a big fan: Canadian Tire money is form of monetary pollution, say like bitcoin dust or the one-cent coin. I just throw it away. It's the monetary oddities that teach us the most abo...

Imagine waking up in the morning and checking the hockey scores, news, the weather, and how much the central bank has adjusted the gold content of the dollar overnight. This is what a 21st century gold standard would look like. Central banks that have operated old fashioned gold standards don't modify the gold price. Rather, they maintain a gold window through which they redeem a constant amount of central bank notes and deposits with gold, say $1200 per ounce of gold, or equivalently $1 with 0.36 grains. And that price stays fixed forever. Because gold is a volatile commodity, linking a nation's unit of account to it can be hazardous. When a mine unexpectedly shuts down in some remote part of the world, the necessary price adjustments to accommodate the sudden shortage must be born by all those economies that use a gold-based unit of account in the form of deflation. Alternatively, if a new technology for mining gold is discovered, the reduction in the real price of gold is f...

Blair Ferguson. Source: Bank of Canada Passive investing is eating Wall Street . According to 2015 Morningstar data , while actively managed mutual funds charge clients 1.08% of each dollar invested per year, passively managed funds levy just a third of that, 0.37%. As the public continues to rebalance out of mutual funds and into index ETFs, Wall Street firms simply won't be able to generate sufficient revenues to support the same number of analysts, salespeople, lawyers, journalists, and other assorted hangers-on. It could be a bloodbath. Here is the very readable Eric Balchunas on the topic: Because when an inv switches from active to passive, it basically means a 70% drop in revenue for industry. #DOLrule https://t.co/HntHyDi3rJ — Eric Balchunas (@EricBalchunas) April 7, 2016 Any firm that faces declining profits due to narrowing margins can restore a degree of profitability by driving more business through its platform. In the case of Wall Street, that means arm-twisting inv...