Video: Market View: A turnaround for BlackBerry? + MORE Jan 22nd

OTTAWA – The Bank of Canada is maintaining its key interest rate at one per cent, where it’s been for more than three years during a weak economic recovery from the last recession.
But the central bank is lowering its forecast for inflation, even though the economy is showing signs of improvement.
It says Canadian inflation has been lower than expected and won’t return to its ideal target for about two years.
The bank says Canada’s economic growth in the second half of 2013 was better than expected — rising to 2.5 per cent in the fourth quarter.
For the full year, the bank is projecting the economy grew by 1.8 per cent in 2013 and will pick up to 2.5 per cent in both 2014 and 2015.
It says stronger demand in the United States as well as the lower Canadian dollar should help boost exports, which will also improve business confidence and investment.
The bank says it will make its next interest rate announcement on March 5 and release its updated outlook for the economy and inflation — including risks to the projection — on April 16…

EAST PALO ALTO, Calif. – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife are donating $5 million to help expand a community health centre in Silicon Valley.
The gift — announced Wednesday — will cover part of the $29 million cost for adding another facility to the Ravenswood Family Health Center in East Palo Alto, Calif. That’s not far from Facebook Inc.’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.
The new building is expected to be complete next year.
The 29-year-old Zuckerberg has become one of the world’s richest people since he started Facebook’s online social network at Harvard University nearly a decade ago. Forbes magazine estimates his wealth at $19 billion.
Zuckerberg has been funneling some of fortune into philanthropy. Last year, he and his wife, Priscilla Chan, donated Facebook stock valued at $900 million to the Silicon Valley Community Foundation.
The post Facebook founder, wife donate $5M to help build new facility at California health centre appeared first on Canadian Business.

Struggling tech company selling more real estate as shares rise, Jacqueline Nelson reports

One of the problems with studies like the one The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ Hugh Mackenzie has come out with, All in a Day’s Work? (CEO Pay in Canada), is that it tars all companies and their executives with the same black brush. As I compiled the data to do some posts (Over-paid CEOs, Fairly-paid CEOs) on my other blog about the really bad (at least from an investor’s viewpoint) companies and some good companies, there was some data that I did not use on the pay received by the companies’ Named Executive Officers (NEOs) i.e. the top managers.The DataMy data looks at the change between 2007, in the heady good time just before the financial crisis and the stock market was at a peak, to 2012. So it isn’t taking a market low for stock prices that company executives could easily beat just by hanging around through the recovery.There are 39 companies in the table, a mix of big ones, such as are in Mackenzie’s list (8 of his top 10), but also smaller ones. It was not scientifically systematic or randomly chosen, I was looking for especially good or bad performers…

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