TEFAF New York Fueled a Historic Surplus in Canada’s Trade Balance With the US

This fall’s TEFAF New York had a
surprising impact on Canada’s trade balance.

According to data released
yesterday by Canada’s national statistical office, our neighbors to
the north saw a 116 percent hike over September in the
Miscellaneous Consumer Goods category of exports. Behind the
increase was hundreds of millions of dollars worth of art shipped
to the US, Bloomberg reports.

With the unexpected jump, Canada
widened its surplus with the US to $5.1 billion—the largest such
figure recorded since the financial crisis in 2008.

“The fine art pieces were
destined to an art fair in New York that began at the end of
October,” the agency said. It didn’t take much sleuthing to discover that
the fair in question was TEFAF, which holds three editions
annually, including two in New York. Of the 91 galleries that
participated in the fair, only Montreal’s Landau Fine Art hailed
from Canada. The gallery showed up to the fair with paintings by
René Magritte, Le Corbusier, and André Derain, as well as a
reclining sculpture by Henry Moore, per TEFAF’s
website.

The boost in art exports
provided a sense of hope for the trade gap picture in Canada, which
saw a shrink in the national deficit from $900 million in September
to $829 million in October. The numbers may be misleading though,
especially if dealers failed to secure a new American home for the
exported artwork.

“Items that do not sell could be
brought back and subsequently included in Canada’s import
statistics,” the statistics agency explained. In other words,
today’s increase might feed tomorrow’s decrease.

Not including the dubious
Miscellaneous Consumer Goods category in the calculation, the value
of all Canadian exports would have gone down. That scenario
represents a turn in the wrong direction for the country, whose
trade deficit has slowly been shrinking since reaching $3.75
billion in December of last year.

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Canada’s Trade Balance With the US appeared first on artnet
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