MacroScope

 All data released last week point to a far better first quarter growth in Canada than previously expected, prompting economists to revise up their predictions.

In a Reuters poll conducted early last month, forecasters predicted that Canada’s economy expanded by just 1.6 percent on an annualised basis in the first three months of this year.

But that consensus could prove to be too low, with many now expecting growth to be close to 2 percent or even higher, likely a welcome sign for Stephen Poloz who was named Bank of Canada’s new governor last Thursday and will replace Mark Carney on June 3.

Last Tuesday brought the first bit of good news, with the monthly gross domestic product (GDP) by industry growing at a faster pace than forecast in February, lifted by strength in potash mining, oil and gas and manufacturing.

Another pleasant surprise came on Thursday when the March report card on trade showed surging exports propelled the country to its first trade surplus in a year.

For Bank of Israel governor Stanley Fischer, this week’s high-powered macroeconomics conference at the International Monetary Fund was a homecoming of sorts. After all, he was the IMF’s first deputy managing director from 1994 to 2001. The familiar nature of his surroundings may have helped inspire Fischer to use a household analogy to describe the vaunted but often ethereal principle of central bank independence.

Fischer, a vice chairman at Citigroup between 2002 and 2005, sought to answer a question posed by conference organizers: If central banks are in charge of monetary policy, financial supervision and macroprudential policy, should we rethink central bank independence?  His take: “The answer is yes.”

In particular, the veteran policymaker, who advised Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke on his PhD thesis at MIT, argued various degrees of independence should be afforded to different functions within a central bank.

Are European bond investors looking for love in all the wrong places?

The premium bankers demand to hold various types of euro zone debt over that of Germany has recently come down. In normal circumstances, this might suggest markets are no longer discriminating between the risks associated with different member countries’ bonds. But analysts say the recent convergence is based on a precarious belief of ECB action rather than any real improvement in economic fundamentals.

Spain and Italy still offer a comfortable premium over Germany. But a narrowing in yield spreads that is being driven by a fall in the funding costs of Spain and Italy, rather than by a rise in German yields, gives reason for pause.

According to Lyn Graham-Taylor, fixed income strategist at Rabobank:

The fact there is almost no movement from Germany and a huge movement in peripherals is indicative to us of this convergence for the wrong reason.

Is the pickup in U.S. jobs growth over before it even started? That’s the conclusion you might reach if you checked out the latest Texas employment update from the Dallas Fed , which shows the Lone Star state added only 4,000 jobs in January.Texas, as boosters like Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher never tire of pointing out, has been an enormous engine of job growth for the United States since the end of the Great Recession.

The state added 335,000 jobs last year. For it to generate a paltry 4,000 jobs in January – well, that sounds like bad news.

Dallas Fed chief regional economist Pia Orrenius isn’t a bit worried. Last year’s data also came in too low initially – what turned out to be 3.1 percent growth was originally estimated at 2.5 percent growth. “Nothing happened to suggest we suddenly slowed in January,” she said in a phone interview. The regional Fed’s manufacturing survey was strong, and the oil rig count was up, she said. Both November and December’s initial jobs figures were revised up sharply, she said. As for January, “We expect this will be revised up as well.” Stay tuned for those revisions then. The state’s run as a driver of U.S. employment growth  may not be over yet.

That’s not a typo in the headline. In a recent speech that took some mental gymnastics to absorb, Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke countered critics of his low rates policy by arguing that a loose monetary policy is the best way to ensure rates can rise to more normal levels.

Why? Because interest rates will naturally move higher once stronger economic growth leads to higher rates of return on investment, Bernanke said. Here’s his argument:

One might argue that the right response to these risks is to tighten monetary policy, raising long-term interest rates with the aim of forestalling any undesirable buildup of risk. I hope my discussion this evening has convinced you that, at least in economic circumstances of the sort that prevail today, such an approach could be quite costly and might well be counterproductive from the standpoint of promoting financial stability. Long-term interest rates in the major industrial countries are low for good reason: Inflation is low and stable and, given expectations of weak growth, expected real short rates are low. Premature rate increases would carry a high risk of short-circuiting the recovery, possibly leading–ironically enough–to an even longer period of low long-term rates. Only a strong economy can deliver persistently high real returns to savers and investors, and the economies of the major industrial countries are still in the recovery phase.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke may be keeping quiet about his future plans, but he sure doesn’t sound like someone planning to seek Senate support for a third term at the helm of the U.S. central bank.

In unapologetic and sometimes testy exchanges before the Senate Banking Committee on Tuesday, the Fed chief defended his record and dismissed one Senate critic in unusually blunt terms.

“None of the things you said are accurate,” Bernanke told Bob Corker, a Republican senator from Tennessee, who accused the Fed of deliberately starting a global currency war and of printing money to bail out big Wall Street banks.

Richard Fisher, the Dallas Fed’s colorfully hawkish president, enjoys touting the remittances that the central bank makes yearly to Treasury, earned, circularly enough, mostly on the returns of the Treasury bonds the Fed holds. Here’s Fisher in September 2010:

All the emergency liquidity facilities that the Federal Reserve instituted were closed down and did not cost the taxpayers of this great country a single dime. Indeed, last year, as we finished up this work, the Federal Reserve paid $47.4 billion in profits to the Treasury. Imagine that! A government agency that (a) created programs that actually worked as promised, (b) made money for the taxpayers in the process and (c) undid the programs – all in the space of about 28 months – once they had done their job.

The amount has only grown since then, as the Fed expanded its asset purchases in an effort to support a subpar economic recovery, totaling a record $88.9 billion for 2012.

On again, off again. That’s been the story with prospects for another round of monetary stimulus from the Federal Reserve. Expectations for a third installment of quantitative easing, the much-debated QE3, had ebbed with improving economic data in the first quarter – but are now flowing anew.

Following a weak employment report for last month, the latest hint that more bond buys could be in the offing came from minutes of the central bank’s April meeting, which saw the Fed leave rates near zero and repeat that it would likely hold them there until at least late 2014. Policymakers appeared to be taking an increasingly dim view of economic prospects given an array of looming threats to growth, even if none are particularly new.

According to the minutes:

Participants identified several downside risks to the projected pace of economic expansion, including the fiscal and financial strains in the euro area and the possibility of an abrupt fiscal consolidation in the United States.

The Federal Reserve doesn’t get much love from Washington these days but it did receive a rare bit of political backing on Wednesday as Democrats defended its role in promoting full employment as well as stable prices.

The U.S. central bank has been the target of criticism from members of both political parties as a result of bank bailouts and hands-off rule-enforcement that let predatory and unsound lending practices go unchecked, among other shortfalls.

But discussing legislation narrowing the Fed’s mandate to a single-minded focus on price stability, Democrats questioned the need to drop the full employment side of the dual mandate.

Jonathan Spicer and Van Tsui contributed to this post.

This week, for the second time ever, the U.S. Federal Reserve published policymakers’ forecasts for when the central bank should start raising rates. The chart suggested a split Fed, with three policymakers expecting a rate rise this year, three next year, seven in 2014 and four in 2015. That’s useful information, as far as it goes.

But as much as the Fed has embraced transparency in recent years, it stopped short of saying which policymaker backs a rate hike in which year – a key bit of data for grasping where the voters on Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s policy-setting committee stand, and how their positions shift over time.

Below is the bar graph that the Fed published Wednesday, with Reuters’ best estimates of who fell where. We stand ready be convinced otherwise by readers offering evidence or insight that supports a different view. Send us an email, gives us a call, write a comment or shout us out on Twitter.