I thought you might do that, Mr. Chairman.
Good morning, everybody. Bonjour, tout le monde.
I am part of the circle of economists who get to meet with finance ministers across the country pre-budget. I thought I would start with a few comments, basically the same thing I said to Mr. Flaherty last week, because we are allowed to talk about what we said. So here we go.
I started by talking about the economic outlook, and you have the private sector consensus forecast in front of you. We're actually below the consensus, which is a bit unusual. We've been leading the pack to a great degree for the last two years in terms of our growth forecast. We're now forecasting growth of just under 2.5%, let's say 2.2% to 2.3%, so just below the consensus.
We see this as a year of deleveraging across our economy. In our forecast we expect governments to withdraw the stimulus they injected in the last two years. We expect households to rebalance their balance sheet. We've seen things like the shortening of mortgage terms. We know personal debt levels are very high, and we've had warnings from Mr. Flaherty and from the Governor of the Bank of Canada, Mr. Carney, that households really have to start managing down, and therefore we expect a positive savings rate of about 5% for households this year. That'll take a bit of steam out of the recovery.
The dollar, of course, is having an impact on our trade balance with the United States. Other forecasters seem to think our exports will recover. We're certainly forecasting a recovery, but we expect the trade balance to be negative for this year, and that puts a negative sign into our forecast.
So growth of 2.25% is not great, but I would say it's much better founded than the growth you find in a lot of other places. The U.S. is still relying very heavily on fiscal and monetary stimulus. We're now at the happy point of being able to withdraw that and get back to a more solid foundation based on private recovery of consumption and investment. That's comment number one.
Comment number two is as follows. I've been in the public domain talking about the fiscal balance going forward and offering the view that we think the federal government can get back to balance as planned in 2015, and maybe even a little ahead of that. That view was very much founded on our belief that nominal income growth is going to be a bit stronger than has been forecast by the department and the consensus of forecasters. Last year we saw stronger nominal income growth than was forecast in the budget. On a going forward basis, even though we're putting the withdrawal of stimulus into our forecast plans, we think the government can get back to a balanced budget position by 2015.
That brings me to point number three, which is stay the course. The government put in place what we think is a very strong and appropriate framework in the last budget. We're now going to be looking for the details to ensure that the plans are put in place to slowly bring down the deficit over the next three years and then get back into a balanced budget in 2015. We're very mindful, for example, that the government managed to manage its forward obligations into the previous fiscal year. We see the government a little ahead of plan this year. I heard Mr. Page say a number of about $40 billion is the deficit for this fiscal year. That's more or less in line with our thinking as well. In fact, we'd be a little bit ahead of that, hoping for a number like $38 billion as the end number for the fiscal deficit.
We think the commitment to get back to a balanced budget in 2015 is very important. We've seen what happens when bond markets lose confidence in governments around the world. That's what has happened in many countries over the last year. So we think that re-anchoring fiscal policy by a commitment to get back to a balanced budget is very important.
I'll stop right there.