Avril 24, 2014
Predictions Recap 
We were very pleased to welcome Duncan Stewart, Director of Research at Deloitte Canada as our special guest on Tuesday, April 8 for a morning event at the Toronto Marriott Downtown Eaton Centre.
Captivating the crowd with both his engaging presentation style and content, Stewart shared Deloitte's 2014 technology, media and telecommunications predictions. Some highlights of his presentation were statistics that tell us a lot about what future technology trends might affect our businesses as well as personal lives. For instance, the consumer product market is currently valued at 768 billion dollars (with 12% growth in the past year), but Stewart suggests that in the future consumer demand will even out for prodcuts and they will spend their money on better services, content, processing speeds, software and applications.
Duncan Stewart can be found on Facebook and Twitter where he regularly shares information and commentary about tech and media.
Economic Outlook Recap
On Tuesday, April 29, we featured a guest panel of senior economists and financial experts at our annual Economic Outlook event. The panelists gave highlighted but concise overviews of the current state of Canadian, US and Global economies, as well as indicating what to expect in the coming year.
Kicking the presentations off, Dawn Desjardins, Assistant Chief Economist at RBC Canada, gave an update on the Canadian economy, focusing on comparisons between our labour market and that of the US, consumer spending, the housing market and inflation/interest rates. Some potential high-growth industires she noted for 2014 are manufacturing, resources and major infrastructure (such as pipelines).
Next up, Derek Burleton, Vice-President and Deputy Chief Economist at TD Canada shared his outlook for the US economy in relation to ours. He spoke about the potential for growth in the US economy, evidenced by an upswing in the housing market and consumer spending. One area of industry growth in the US is manufacturing, which he warned might be competition for Canadian suppliers.
The final presentation of the night was on emerging global markets by Derek Holt, Vice-President of Economics at Scotiabank. He told the audience that the current global economy is very different than it’s ever been in the past, because a lot of focus is now on emerging markets. These markets count for 1/3 of the global economy and include players like Mexico, Columbia, China, India and Japan.