Stocks are mostly down this morning.
One exception is TransForce up 1.4% to $24.00 continuing a recent recovery from a low of just under $19.00.
AutoCanada is down 0.5% to $19.53 despite a new report indicating that April auto sales in Canada were at a record high.
Statistics Canada reported today that Canada’s trade figures deteriorated with both exports and imports declining in March and the trade deficit widening.
Total exports in March versus February were down 4.8% on an annualised and seasonally adjusted basis. Contributing to this decline, ores and non-metallic minerals were down 15.6% in March versus February. Month to month figures appear to suffer from higher measurement uncertainty and the difficulty of making seasonal adjustments.
On a year over year basis total exports were down 5.1%. Big contributors to that were energy down 39% and ores and non-metallic minerals down 24% as well as industrial machinery down 6.5%. These figures are in actual current dollars. It’s interesting to note that GDP figures are initially reported in what Statistics Canada calls 2007 chained dollars which basically assume no price changes for commodities like oil. On that basis the contribution of the energy industry to GDP does not appear to have declined all that much. When the GDP figures in current dollars become available we will see that the contribution of the energy industry to GDP in actual current dollars was down dramatically in 2015. What remains to be seen is how much of a contagion effect that will have on the rest of the economy. Next week Statistics Canada will release the GDP contribution by industry in current dollars for each province (though, strangely, not for the country as a whole). To extent it gets noticed in the press, I do think the decline in the contribution to GDP of the energy industry in Alberta will be shocking. So far, the contagion to other sectors of the economy has been somewhat limited by the fact that there has been no exodus of people from Alberta and the fact that the government continues to spend apace. The ultimate impact on the Alberta economy will depend on where energy prices go and on the ability of the energy industry to reduce costs.