Business Outlook & Senior Loan Officer Surveys (Q4)

The latest quarterly business surveys indicate that, while businesses expect sales growth to slow this year, investment and employment should continue to expand. As such, we remain cautiously optimistic about the outlook for business investment. We doubt, however, that economic growth and gains in employment will be strong enough to prevent the unemployment rate from rising further. As such, we think the Bank of Canada is likely to lower its policy rate, to 0.50% from 1.00% by the end of the second quarter.