You needn’t go beyond the title and the first paragraph for an accurate description of the current state of the Canadian housing market. Another “victory” for zero percent interest rates.
“My net worth has obviously gone up a lot, just based on what’s happened this year, because the market’s gone berserk,” said McDonald, a former arborist who started acquiring single-family homes in the small city of Barrie, Ontario, in 2015, and now says he has a net worth “in the millions.”
Although this debate was held nearly a year ago, it’s worth watching just to see how Denis Rancourt skillfully handles his opponent on the issue of mask mandates. Rancourt’s calm demeanor clearly gets to Kyle Johnson, and in the last few minutes he is frustrated enough to resort to the “conspiracy theorist” epithet.
It’s been said that the revolution eats its own children, but in this case the children seem positively eager to devour themselves.
In a Facebook post, School Strike 4 Climate’s Auckland chapter said it was shutting down because it “has been a racist, white-dominated space.” It directed people concerned about climate change to Indigenous-led groups and said it would not be organizing any more climate strikes.
Many of us have seen this coming for quite some time. It’s par for the course when computer models substitute for rational judgement.
Should we aim for higher,” [Tam] asked. “Yes, I think we should. As I said, shoot for higher, shoot for gold, shoot for the stars. That gives us a better buffer for managing the COVID-19 situation.”
Shooting the economy in the head should not be confused with shooting for the stars.
There’s not many things that Zimbabwe gets right these days, but when it comes to Covid treatment they make Canada look like a banana republic. In a nutshell, Ivermectin is widely available and widely used in Zimbabwe. Their case curve has been essentially flat since February.
Being very aggressive with a drug which has caused 16 deaths in 32 years in 4 billion doses is not being a cowboy; it’s trying to save the patient’s life.
It seems that in Britain you can find people in authority who openly admit that they are pushing for permanent lockdowns. Over here, you can’t even find a mainstream journalist willing to broach that subject.
“If we’d only locked down earlier”. A great discussion of the destructiveness of lockdowns and various related issues. If only Brian Pallister, among many others, would step outside their comfort zones and put some balance into public policy.
Why would any business owner support this bunch?
It all comes down to a slow return to pre-pandemic revenue levels amid continuing restrictions, along with a large debt load that makes it impossible for struggling firms to borrow more.
Why bother to correctly identify the problem if all you propose are solutions which will largely make it worse? The 12 point program linked to the article seems like a prescription for suicide.
With a capital structure beaten to a pulp by pandemic restrictions and climate change goals whose objective is to murder immensely profitable industries, it’s quite likely that supply and demand imbalances are anything but temporary. About the only thing you can be certain of is that the arsonists at the central banks will keep stocking up on gasoline.
Lane’s speech is an attempt to brush off worries about faster inflation that could prompt Canadians and investors to anticipate an accelerated exit from emergency monetary policy settings. Annual inflation in Canada already hit 3.4 per cent in April,…
The cynic in me says that the end of the nation is upon us after reading about this decision of the Victoria city council.
Committee members agreed and as a result, the city will not stage any of the typical events on Canada Day this year.
This time to destroy the North American economy.
Using various code names – and operations “marmalade” and “peanut butter” being of particularly high risk, according to the Washington Post – the protesters planned to descend on an undisclosed location along a pipeline route known as “Line 3.”
As governments of all levels in nearly every nation have removed all the brakes on the debt engine, there are plenty of us wondering how and when the end game will occur. Many believed that the implosion should have happened long ago, but as Keith Weiner, CEO of Monetary Metals, explains in this op-ed, fiat dollars have a very captive audience, like it or not. Although the analysis refers to the debts of the United States, rest assured that Canada is in a much deeper hole.
Leaving aside that there is no political will to even attempt [to pay off the debt]—most people seem happy to borrow more to spend more—it isn’t even mathematically possible.
You know things are getting bad when the frenzied purchase of consumption goods starts to outstrip investment in dividend-earning plant and equipment. Why expend effort to create more seed corn when you can just gorge yourself on whatever is already in the bin?
A bigger concern for Canada might be real-estate dominance. Statistics Canada’s latest tally of gross domestic product on June 1 shows that residential investment has rarely been a bigger part of the overall economy. That’s great for real-estate brokers, but bad for competitiveness, because it suggests that houses are becoming a magnet for precious investment dollars that could be put to more productive uses. As Evan Siddall, the former head of Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp., tweeted in April, “Housing is mining our economic future.”
This detailed takedown of Mark Carney’s vision of the new socialist utopia should send shudders down the spine of anyone who has an affinity for a society based on the principles of free markets.
Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse. Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.
But somehow the new socialism will not be socialism as usual. This time it’s different. We can because we must. The threat is too great to permit any argument. It’s surprising that as he was picking out choice quotes from Lenin for his book, Carney missed this one: “No more opposition now, comrades! The time has come to put an end to opposition, to put the lid on it. We have had enough opposition!”
Once these latest stats sink in, we’ll probably hear more calls for “stimulus”. In reality, it’s precisely this “stimulus” that results in an avalanche of government borrowing that hoovers up and destroys capital that could have been otherwise used to refit aging industrial infrastructure. Covid theater is taking a huge toll as well.
Canada’s labour market lost 207,000 jobs last month as a spike in COVID-19 variant cases led to renewed public health restrictions and raised concerns about longer-term economic consequences from the pandemic.
The unemployment rate rose to 8.1 per cent from 7.5 per cent in March, Statistics Canada reported. It would have been 10.5 per cent had it included in calculations Canadians who wanted to work but didn’t search for a job.
(Addendum from Kate — In mostly open Saskatchewan, employment increased by 9,500 (+1.7%) and the unemployment rate fell 0.7 percentage points to 6.6%. Oddly enough.)
Will the province of Manitoba issue arrest warrants for the organizers of this rally as they did for an anti-lockdown rally last week? That’s not likely to happen if past experience is a guide. It would seem that the science is settled: Covid is not a threat when gatherings are in support of an approved political cause.
The organizers said they would not grant interviews — they included justifications for holding the rally in the midst of the pandemic in the social media posts.
When asked how the no gathering rule will be enforced at the rally, a provincial spokesman said nothing official is on the books — but the public health order is clear.
The story paywall goes up in the next 24 hours.
As asset prices rise thanks to zero percent interest rates, this was inevitable. Unless pandemic-induced isolation leads to higher incomes for some reason I’m unaware of, these buyers will eventually find themselves owning assets that they actually can’t afford.
Sales in Muskoka increased 267 per cent in April from a year earlier, according to the Canadian Real Estate Association. The median price for waterfront properties, at the same time, rose more than 70 per cent to $890,000, although Harding said listings tend to begin above the $1-million mark.
The desire for waterfront properties grew among Canada’s wealthy as pandemic-induced isolation measures kicked in. Both Harding and Richard Scully, the agent selling the $24-million lakefront property, said it’s normal to have anywhere from five to 25 offers on a property. Cottages tend now to stay on the market for no more than 10 days, when it used to take 40 to 50 days to close a sale, Harding said.
The good doctor at Johns Hopkins weighs in on the herd immunity issue with some sound advice.
Makary criticised “the most slow, reactionary, political CDC in American history” for not clearly communicating the scientific facts about natural immunity compared to the kind of immunity developed through vaccines.
Dr. Marty Makary made the comments during a recent interview, noting that “natural immunity works” and it is wrong to vilify those who don’t want the vaccine because they have already recovered from the virus.
As we stumble through week 78 (or close to it) of the Covid crisis, it’s important to put our current experience in perspective. When you erase price signals from a sector of the economy, dysfunction becomes a feature, not a bug. Central planners will blame everything for their failures with the exception, of course, of central planning.
The video below is from an enterprising former retail sales worker turned citizen historian who goes by the name of TIK (The Imperator Knight) who now makes a living producing Youtube videos on military history and economics. In this video, he analyzes the failures of central planning in Nazi Germany in the coal and railway industry. You can see some important parallels that apply to our response to Covid.
TIK’s videos are extensively researched and informative. His ongoing analysis of the battle of Stalingrad (now up to 23 episodes) is well worth watching.
The only thing worse than Stockholm Syndrome (as discussed in an earlier post) would be for the authorities to allow a hostage situation to continue until all of the captives publicly express agreement with the goals of their captors.
But vaccine targets are at least partially arbitrary. The threshold needed to achieve population immunity against SARS-CoV-2 is still being debated, the goalposts ever-shifting. Once 60 per cent, now 70 to 80 per cent — and maybe higher. “What if we get stalled at 78 per cent,” said Peter Loewen, professor of political science, global affairs and public policy at the University of Toronto. “Do we just keep holding off? When do we round up?”