Bank of Canada releases Monetary Policy Report

The Bank of Canada released its October Monetary Policy Report, which discusses current economic and financial trends in the context of Canada's inflation-control strategy.
 
In the Report, the Bank noted that three major interrelated global developments are having a profound impact on the Canadian economy and making the outlook for growth and inflation more uncertain than it was at the time of the July Monetary Policy Report Update. First, the intensification of the global financial crisis has led to severe strains in financial markets. The associated need for the global banking sector to continue to reduce leverage will restrain growth for some time. Second, the global economy appears to be heading into a mild recession, led by a U.S. economy that is already in recession. Third, there have been sharp declines in many commodity prices.
 
Consistent with the G7 Plan of Action, major economies have announced extraordinary measures to stabilize their financial systems. These initiatives will be pivotal to the resumption of the flow of credit to support global economic growth. Canada's economy and strong financial system will benefit directly from these actions.
 
The weaker outlook for global demand will increase the drag on the Canadian economy coming from exports. Lower commodity prices will also dampen the outlook, working through a deterioration in Canada's terms of trade to moderate domestic demand growth. The marked tightening in Canadian credit conditions in recent weeks will restrain business and housing investment.
 
The Bank expects growth to be sluggish through the first quarter of next year, then to pick up over the rest of 2009 and to accelerate to above-potential growth in 2010 supported by improving credit conditions, the lagged effects of monetary policy actions, and stronger global growth. The recent sizable depreciation of the Canadian dollar will also provide an important offset to the effects of weaker global demand and lower commodity prices. Overall, the Bank projects average annual growth in real GDP of 0.6 per cent in both 2008 and 2009, and 3.4 per cent in 2010.
 
With excess supply projected to build throughout 2009, and with lower assumed energy prices, inflationary pressures will ease significantly relative to the projection in the July Monetary Policy Report Update. Core inflation is now projected to remain below 2 per cent until the end of 2010. Total CPI inflation should peak during the third quarter of 2008, fall below 1 per cent in mid-2009, and then return to the 2 per cent target by the end of 2010.
    
On 21 October, the Bank of Canada lowered its policy interest rate by 25 basis points. That decision followed a 50 basis point cut on 8 October taken in concert with other major central banks. Together, these moves bring the cumulative reduction in the Bank's target for the overnight rate to 75 basis points since the Bank's previous fixed announcement date on 3 September.
 
These actions provide timely and significant support to the Canadian economy. The cumulative reduction in the Bank's policy rate since the beginning of December 2007 is now 225 basis points.
 
In line with the new outlook, some further monetary stimulus will likely be required to achieve the 2 per cent inflation target over the medium term. The evolution of the financial crisis, its impact on the global economy, and the timing of the effects of the various extraordinary measures being taken to address it pose significant risks to the inflation projection on both the upside and the downside.

Pride of Owning Antique Furniture at Your Home

Furniture plays a very important role in deciding the look of your home. Perfect set of furniture can make your home look stunning. It is the selection and arrangements of furniture that makes the home worth living and pride for the owner.
There is always a great craze for antique furniture among people. It displays your unique sense of affection for class and integrity. Pride of owing antique furniture shows the love for beauty of past and history.

Antique furniture is among rare collectibles, made of best quality of durable wood (generally teak and sandalwood). They illustrate fine art and carvings along with matching traditions of their time. They also carry the rich heritage and history along with them. Their association with notable names or period makes them unique and special. All these things are decisive factor for their rarity and expensiveness.
Antique furniture collections are categorized based on their periods or styles. Some important and famous classifications are as follows:

• Gothic – Antique furniture in this category is influenced by church architecture. The style is mainly characterized by pointed arches, counterbalancing buttresses, open tracery and vertical grandiose emphasis.
• Renaissance – Furniture under this category is derived from Italian Renaissance style, mainly oak functional furniture with scroll & arabesque carving, etc. with horizontal emphasis.
• Early Colonial - With some wealth attained, carved oak Hadley chests and turned Great Chairs start making their way into American homes.

Antique furniture collections were made with stress over the beauty, comfort and knowledge of interiors. People take interested in antique furniture due to their masterpiece in carving. Most of the antique furniture has some kind of rare carving style illustrating excellent designs. They are usually made of good quality of materials, so the chances of decaying are less. Antique furniture posses nice design and do not change with time.

Many people seek antique furniture at great bargains and restore the furniture to make it more valuable and/or more adaptable for today’s households. Either way an antique piece in any home is a unique addition that can be cherished for many generations to come.

Cookies and what they really are.

Read every concern ever expressed on cookies and you'll have heard that they can put a virus on your PC. Some people think that Web sites can use cookies to get your e-mail address, others believe that cookies might be used to track every single site you visit on the Internet. Worst of all, a major newspaper once wrote that “cookies are little programs planted by a remote Web site on your PC, which then feedback personal information without your knowledge”.

It's no wonder people are scared, but they shouldn't be - this is all nonsense, there are concerns about cookies, but they're not the ones that appear in the scare stories.

What is a cookie?

Whether it's remembering a password so it can automatically log you on to a site when you return, or storing the contents of your shopping basket the next time you visit an on-line store, Web sites need a means of storing data about their visitors.
Each time you choose an item at your favorite Net shopping site, the site sends a cookie request to your browser, asking it to store a line of text that identifies that particular item. This means you can stop shopping any time you like, go visit some other sites, and whenever you return, the site will read its own cookies and you can carry on shopping where you left off.
Sounds sinister? No, and there are a couple of clues that undo some of the more extravagant scare stories.
First, cookies only contain information that you have already given to the Web site (a user name and password, a shopping selection, or whatever). Cookies cannot be used to get personal information about you that you haven't already provided, such as your e-mail address.
Second, cookies aren't programs, they have no intelligence of their own, they cannot infect your system with a virus or anything similar. They are a few lines of text, nothing more.

Are you being tracked?

One of the biggest concerns over cookies is that they can be used to track all the sites you visit on the Web. What if one site read all your other cookies, for example? No worries there - a site can only read its own cookies, not anyone else's. There is another concern, though, one that does have a degree of truth to it.

Many Web sites use banner adverts to fund them and some of the companies that produce these came up with an ingenious scheme, using a cookie to give your PC a unique number. Visit another site using the same advertiser and they'll recognize you, know the adverts you've seen before, and can show you similar ones (if you've clicked on some), different ones (if you haven't), or otherwise customize what you see.

Recognize you? Sounds alarming, but really they're just recognizing the system. They know that the computer that visited site A on Tuesday is now at site B on Wednesday - but they don't know who is using it, or even where it is.

However, if you provide your personal details at one site, they could be attached to the unique ID provided by the cookie and, if they agreed, all the sites could share in the information. Surely this must be a concern?

Well, consider this. First, not all sites use advertising, and those that do don't all use the same companies - there's no system that would track anything but a small percentage of the places you visit. What's more, cookies are very unreliable. Many PCs are used by different people, and cookies won't record that.

They might get deleted if you upgrade your browser or reinstall it. Is this a useful way to track people's activities? We don't think so.

To put this into perspective, in the real world, information is collected without our knowledge every time we buy something with a credit card or use a supermarket loyalty card, and mailing lists relating to each of us are being sold all the time. Where do you think junk mail comes from?

Data sharing is much less prevalent on the Internet, where any company that was shown to be collecting data on people and even only potentially creating a mild infringement of privacy would immediately create a firestorm of bad publicity.

Overall, cookies do more good than harm.