Why worry? There’s no problem here that can’t be solved with infinite amortization.
“…he owns 8 condos in toronto. half of them he told me are negative geared.”
one of the biggest problems we face in is the damage RE participants caused because of a belief in an INFINITE UP market.
very few have mitigated downside risk by simply paying off debts or leveraging more safely.
last night i attended a party where a 35 year old so called…
— daniel de melis (@d_demelis) August 6, 2023
My advice for any company investing in Quebec? Get out, while you still can.
A Quebec trucking company has been ordered to reinstate a driver who was fired after she drank at least nine beers before she lost control of her truck on a Pennsylvania highway.
Labour arbitrator Huguette April says the driver’s drinking was from alcoholism — a disability — and that trucking company Groupe Robert should have made a reasonable accommodation for her.
Judging by the popularity of the concept of expropriation without compensation in South Africa, I suspect that the Zimbabwe experience is just around the corner for them, keeping in mind that the idiot tweeting this is actually a member of their parliament. Other than the collapse of industrial agriculture and widespread starvation, what could possibly go wrong?
National cohesion depends on equitable and just resolution of the land question.
Most of the land was robbed from the Africans in the 1600s, 1700s, and 1800s.
It's not clear why Expropriation Without Compensation is an issue when the land in question was actually stolen. pic.twitter.com/GxcQ0TwJOI— Mzwanele Manyi (@MzwaneleManyi) July 24, 2023
Collapsing margins in the freight business and a union which can’t grasp this fact may be claiming another victim, but there’s more to it than just a slowdown in the economy. The article is unclear as to whether Yellow’s pension fund is defined benefit or not, but in any case decades of falling interest rates are turning pension obligations into a millstone around the necks of a lot of companies.
Yellow Corp. (NASDAQ: YELL) has failed to make its required pension contributions for June and is planning to withhold payments for July. The pension funds, pension accruals and health care coverage for workers will suspend on Sunday, according to a statement by the Teamsters.
The Teamsters union has threatened to strike by Monday if this is not resolved and the pension contributions remain in default. The company owes $50 million, a large sum for a company in financial distress. Yellow currently has in excess of $100 million in cash reserves, according to an 8-K filed on July 7.
Why doesn’t everyone just fake reality on my behalf? All the cool kids are demanding it these days.
Can we change the very structure of reality for everyone?
No, but some will try to pretend along with the crazies that they share their plethora of idiotic fantasy worlds that are increasingly more impossible to keep track of with hundreds of made up pronouns and “identities”. pic.twitter.com/d0vWM3tc4J
— Dr. Syed Haider (@DrSyedHaider) July 9, 2023
This is like an arsonist drawing attention to an increase in the number of fires in his neighborhood. It’s not really the case that everyone saved more during the pandemic, but rather that they borrowed more and felt wealthier because of it. This was particularly true of nearly every level of government. Nonetheless, I fully expect that the magic of infinite amortization will solve the problem of debt default going forward, right?
A former Bank of Canada economist says the trend of rising household insolvencies could spell trouble for the broader economy down the line.
Insolvencies dropped during the pandemic as people saved money, but Charles St-Arnaud, chief economist with Alberta Central, told BNN Bloomberg that the trend is now being “reversed completely,” with insolvencies up compared with 2019 – and the rise has been much faster than expected.
We’re now approaching the point where the bill for all the pandemic Keynesian stimulus is coming due, and the marginal consumer is having a tough time paying it.
Insolvencies, which include bankruptcies and proposals to renegotiate loans, rose 12.3 per cent in May from April and are up 30.9 per cent from the same time last year on an adjusted basis, according to data from Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada. They are now at their highest level since the start of the pandemic…
Complex Systems Won’t Survive the Competence Crisis
At a casual glance, the recent cascades of American disasters might seem unrelated. In a span of fewer than six months in 2017, three U.S. Naval warships experienced three separate collisions resulting in 17 deaths. A year later, powerlines owned by PG&E started a wildfire that killed 85 people. The pipeline carrying almost half of the East Coast’s gasoline shut down due to a ransomware attack. Almost half a million intermodal containers sat on cargo ships unable to dock at Los Angeles ports. A train carrying thousands of tons of hazardous and flammable chemicals derailed near East Palestine, Ohio. Air Traffic Control cleared a FedEx plane to land on a runway occupied by a Southwest plane preparing to take off. Eye drops contaminated with antibiotic-resistant bacteria killed four and blinded fourteen.
While disasters like these are often front-page news, the broader connection between the disasters barely elicits any mention. America must be understood as a system of interwoven systems; the healthcare system sends a bill to a patient using the postal system, and that patient uses the mobile phone system to pay the bill with a credit card issued by the banking system. All these systems must be assumed to work for anyone to make even simple decisions. But the failure of one system has cascading consequences for all of the adjacent systems. As a consequence of escalating rates of failure, America’s complex systems are slowly collapsing.
Grab a coffee.
If anyone thought that Covid lockdowns and the war in the Ukraine were not only costless but actually economically beneficial, you need to reconsider that point of view. Throw in years of zero percent interest rates which have devastated retirement earnings and you now have a lethal combination.
“With living costs rising, I have to work permanently,” she says. “I have three small occupational pensions totalling about £1,000 a month, and my husband has a teacher’s pension, but we can’t afford to live without working. When our energy bills rose to £400 a month, there was no choice but to go back.”
Apart from feeling the pinch because of high inflation, the couple are having to clear debt they accrued during the Covid lockdowns, when they had to financially support their three grownup children. “They are all living in or around London, and two of them were made redundant during the pandemic. We took out a £10,000 loan to help out with their rent and other things for four, five months. I’m working to pay that off, and we still help out now and again. ”
In the market for a sex change? Ontario has decided that it has other priorities for health care spending, so some of the previously tax funded services associated with sex changes will no longer be covered by the province. Naturally for the Red Star, they don’t make it clear as to what services are still covered. Presumably, we’ve still got a ways to go before taxpayers are not compelled to fund cosmetic surgery at all.
Toronto based Connect-Clinic, which shut down in December of 2022 after OHIP fees for virtual-only medical services were lowered, launched a new online venture Wednesday under the banner Foria Clinic.
The online clinic will provide virtual services such as gender-affirming hormone therapy and surgical referrals to patients throughout Ontario.
BREAKING: The U.S. Supreme Court rules colleges and universities must stop considering race in admissions, putting an end to affirmative action in higher education.
More: Democrats Devastated As Supreme Court Bans Racism
@EWErickson – Clarence Thomas responds to Ketanji Brown Jackson’s racist world view with pure fire.
How much would you pay to see a Taylor Swift or Beyoncé concert? I couldn’t be bothered in any event but price doesn’t seem to be an object for quite a number of concert goers these days. I’ve heard similar things from a friend who looked into purchasing tickets for an Adele concert in Vegas recently but changed his mind after seeing the prices.
A perusal of ticket-purchasing sites makes the sticker shock clear. On reseller Stubhub, the cheapest seat for a July Taylor Swift show in Seattle is $1,200; tickets for an August Mexico City show cost $500 each.
“I had to get nine phone numbers for three different accounts on Ticketmaster under three different credit cards,” said Joel Barrios, a Beyoncé fan in Los Angeles. He spent about $7,000 on three U.S. shows for himself and friends – as well as another $6,650 for several shows in Europe.
The Safety Culture: The Dangers of Being a Germophobe
Good discussion.
If Manitobans think their education taxes are already too high, they’ll seem like a bargain compared to the day that Wab Kinew introduces taxpayer financed meals (prepared by unionized staff, no doubt) for every school kid in the province.
NDP Leader Wab Kinew pledged Saturday to require all 690 Manitoba public schools to offer free meals to students before the end of the 2023-24 school year, should his party form government following an election slated for Oct. 3.
What’s even more troubling is that the provincial conservatives appear to be at least open to the idea, as opposed to roundly condemning it.
The Progressive Conservatives otherwise chose not criticize the NDP promise. Instead, the PCs repeated their contention the NDP will be forced to raise taxes in order to pay for promises if they’re elected this fall.
The dynamic is basically, “You, unlike me, have some self-restraint, which gives me an advantage, therefore I shall test it and see how far I can go.” It’s the psychology of a child unaccustomed to consequences.
Meet Narcissistic Glitter Bint and her ideological comrades.
The principle reason why the younger generation finds itself gobbling up the capital of their parents is straightforward enough: decades of falling interest rates have made it progressively more difficult to accumulate risk-free retirement savings for retirement or asset purchases. On the flip side, the same falling rates lead to rising asset prices, putting things like home ownership out of reach for many.
The Keynesians won’t be satisfied until the savings of every last one of us is drawn down to zero.
Over half of parents surveyed say they’ve dipped into their savings to help their adult children, with one in five making significant sacrifices. Nearly half have also put off paying down debt to provide support, and more than two in five parents reported helping at the expense of their retirement savings. Overall, about 16% of parents reported significantly putting off hitting other financial milestones in order to prioritize their children’s financial needs.
…continuing to help out adult children can lead to a “vicious cycle” where if parents overextend themselves, they might end up jeopardizing their own financial security and may need to call on their children for support at some point.
If you are wondering why mortgage rates in the 5 to 7 percent range have not triggered a wave of defaults, here’s your answer.
If anyone thinks there’s no downside to this, think again. Any decline in housing prices has largely been arrested, thus making it just as tough as ever for first time home buyers to purchase a house. Allowing negative amortization essentially turns home buyers into the equivalent of deadbeat tenants, while locking up the capital of bond investors far beyond what they signed up for. We now have the worst of both worlds.
A lot of posts about lack of listings.
Reason is 4 of 5 big banks have been given the green light by the Feds to extend amortizations to “infinity and beyond” or allow negative amortizations due to static payment variable products.
We are in a duct tape RE market.
— Vince Gaetano (@VinceGaetano) April 10, 2023
Last week, NPR laid off 84 people and stopped production on four seasonal podcasts, including Invisibilia, Louder Than a Riot and Rough Translation. The company warned in February those cuts would be coming after it projected a $30 million sponsorship shortfall this year.
Thirteen roles in the organization’s digital team are also planned to be cut, but that group unionized through a separate union for broadcast employees and technicians and haven’t yet agreed on a contract with NPR, despite the organization voluntarily recognizing them. This means they cannot be laid off until a contract or separate lay-off agreement is met.
While layoffs often mark the abrupt end of an era at an organization, NPR’s story has stretched into this week, spilling over into multiple, tense all-hands meetings in which impacted employees grilled executives about their decisions. […]
A group of executives, including president and CEO John Lansing, presented various financial metrics and updates on the diversity levels at the organization following the layoffs. As of March 24th, for example, NPR had booked $28.9 million in sponsorship revenue for the first quarter, compared to $41 million the year prior. The team highlighted that diversity levels remained roughly consistent before and after the cuts, though trans people in the programming department dropped, going from 2.5% of the workforce to 1.2%.
It gets better.
Who needs surpluses when you’ve got votes to buy? You would think with the recent crappy news coming out of financial markets, any government with an actual budgetary surplus would at least consider paying down some debt, but not in BC anyway. In any event, it would be helpful if the government at least knew where the money was going.
In a recent column, CHEK News legislative correspondent Rob Shaw wrote that the B.C. Legislature was approving spending items so quickly that MLAs often couldn’t explain where the money was going or why it was needed.
Shaw wrote when Agriculture Minister Pam Alexis was queried on why she had requested an extra $111 million in spending, she replied by reading her own press release.
We’d still live in caves, but with really really fancy curtains.
Sometimes a single incident efficiently summarizes a larger trend. So it is with New York University’s selection of its new president, Linda Mills, a licensed clinical social worker and an NYU social work professor. She researches trauma and bias, as well as race and gender in the legal academy. She is a documentary filmmaker and teaches advocacy filmmaking. She serves as an NYU vice chancellor and as a senior vice provost for Global Programs and University Life. In all these roles, Mills is the very embodiment of the contemporary academy. The most significant part of her identity, however, and the one that ties the rest of her curriculum vitae together, is that she is female, and thus overdetermined as NYU’s next president.
Mills is part of the Great Feminization of the American university, an epochal change whose consequences have yet to be recognized. Seventy-five percent of Ivy League presidents are now female. Nearly half of the 20 universities ranked highest by Forbes will have a female president this fall, including MIT, Harvard, and Columbia. Of course, feminist bean-counters in the media and advocacy world are not impressed, noting that “only” 5 percent of the 130 top U.S. research universities are headed by a black female and “only” 22 percent of those federal grant-magnets have a non-intersectional (i.e., white) female head.
Truthfully, I’m not sure we’d have curtains.
Female students and administrators often exist in a co-dependent relationship, united by the concepts of victim identity and of trauma. For university females, there is not, apparently, strength in numbers. The more females’ ranks increase, the more we hear about a mass nervous breakdown on campus. Female students disproportionately patronize the burgeoning university wellness centers, massage therapies, relaxation oases, calming corners, and healing circles.
I quote myself: Militant feminism arose as compensation for female inadequacy.