OTTAWA (Reuters) – The Bank of Canada likely would have started raising rates sooner if it had known a year ago all the things it now knows, Governor Tiff Macklem said in a newspaper interview published on Thursday, the day after the central bank shocked markets with a rare 100-basis-point rate increase.
“If we had known everything a year ago that we know today, yes, we probably would have started raising interest rates a little bit earlier,” Macklem told the Financial Post newspaper. “But we didn’t know. A year ago, there was still a lot of excess supply in the economy.”
(Reporting by Julie Gordon in Ottawa)