May you buy in interesting times;

I have read so many stories about Vancouver homes selling above their listing price over the years that I find myself completely numb to the phenomenon now. Of course every once and a while I’ll read a story of some house selling at an astronomical price, and I’ll try to comprehend the logic and fundamentals behind these moves. But after so many years of seeing these stories, I find the shock and confusion fades quickly and I get back to my day as if everything was normal. But I think it doesn’t take a real estate specialist or an international monetary watchdog to see that things in the Vancouver real estate market are far from ‘normal’.
Some news articles have made an attempt to explain the drivers behind the market’s incredible jump. In this link, a real estate agent explains that the premium paid on the home he sold recently was simply the result of a very successful marketing strategy.

Yeah, that must be it.
h/t Melinda Romanoff

OPM crack in context.

You Have Come To The Attention Of The Authorities. . .

“Who’s there?”
“Reserve Currency.”
“Reserve currency who?”

Hong Kong blowing up.

…will flock together.

Mr. Bo was counted as a friend by Montreal’s powerful Desmarais family, which cultivated the Bo family for decades and saw its businesses in China grow as Mr. Bo rose in power. Canadian politicians also sought him out: Prime Minister Stephen Harper and former prime minister Jean Chrétien were among the last high-profile foreign visitors to Chongqing, the southwestern Chinese city Mr. Bo governed until his arrest on corruption charges.

Via NWC

Nortel had other troubles, but Shields is almost certainly right when he says that that cyber theft contributed to its bankruptcy, and the loss of almost 100,000 jobs.

When I saw this, I thought this was a China thing.

Cause there goes another $60M in Iron and Steel Mills and Ferro-Alloy Manufacturing exports.
But I’m sure it’s just the Dutch Disease.
h/t: maz2

Elect socialists, reap rewards….

The Quebec Employers Council, the largest business group in the province, expressed “deep concern about the negative impacts” of the PQ tax hikes, and economist Brigitte Alepin warns Marois could chase away the richest taxpayers.

China is a kleptocracy of a scale never seen before in human history. This post aims to explain how this wave of theft is financed, what makes it sustainable and what will make it fail.

h/t Melinda Romanoff

An opinion piece by Diane Francis;

The new Game of Thrones is not about military conquest but about picking off trophy assets from countries, like Canada, that are Boy Scouts and naïve enough to let them do so. And growing and nurturing large successful entities is essential to any nation-state. Size matters.

h/t Brian

Here we are ….

Beijing-based PetroChina said it has completed the acquisition of a 20% stake in Shell’s 100%-owned land and assets in Groundbirch, in northeastern British Columbia. PetroChina didn’t disclose the value of the deal and Shell declined to comment.

h/t Adrian

… that both “Saskatchewan” and “potash” were the subject of international intrigue, high-tech espionage and a potential plot for a James Bond movie, one of the most interesting aspects to the story was that the hackers also targeted the two primary Toronto law firms involved in the transaction: Blake Cassels & Graydon LLP, which represented BHP, and Stikeman Elliott LLP, which represented Potash Corp.
The law firms had sophisticated Internet security systems in place to prevent the malware from accessing and disclosing any confidential information about the transaction or any other client information. But the fact cyber-spies interested in the potash deal would attack law firms for information that might give them, their “customer,” or perhaps their country an edge, should reinforce within the legal community the importance of continuously maintaining and updating online security.
[…]
The BHP/Potash story should serve as a wake-up call to clients who need to be sure the confidential information contained on their lawyer’s servers relating to their businesses will be kept confidential and secure, and immune from attack by cyber criminals or cyber spies.

Or, you know – it could serve as a “wake-up call” that China is a criminal enterprise.
h/t RV

Further to Kate’s post, one just hopes that damn oil pipeline to the west coast gets built for the Chinese and other Asian markets (more here).

…or Americans–including immigrants’ progeny–when they are in constant contact with their home culture?

…The cheap, instant and often nearly constant communication made possible by the technology revolution has fundamentally altered the experience of moving away from home.
“Because telecommunications is everywhere and is so cheap, people never really leave their communities,” Mark Podlasly, founder of the Brookmere Management Group, a Vancouver consulting firm, told me. “You can leave but still have a 24/7 connection with your home community. People are never really gone. You can be a citizen anywhere.”..

And it isn’t just the Internet. See what’s at Rogers Cable:

…
Arabic (4)
Bangla (3)
Bengali (1)
Cantonese (6)
English (4)
German (2)
Greek (3)
Gujarati (1)
Hebrew (1)
Hindi (18)
Italian (2)
Japanese (1)
Korean (2)
Malayalam (1)
Mandarin (10)
News (1)
Polish (3)
Portuguese (3)
Punjabi (8)
Russian (6)
Spanish (9)
Tagalog (4)
Tamil (6)
Urdu (4)
Vietnamese (1)

And see the “Packs” and “Packages”.

Further to this from Adrian MacNair on the recent Fraser Institute immigration study,

Family Reunification is Breaking the Canadian Piggy Bank

a lot of individuals’ piggy banks are being broken too:

Housing costs soar in Vancouver
Surging real estate prices in Vancouver are pushing ownership costs into uncharted territory, putting it in the top ranks of the world’s most expensive cities and triggering fears the market is poised for a fall…

Funny that the Globe and Mail story not once mentions immigrants–but see this:

Vancouver Housing Prices Pass New York and London as Chinese ‘Move’ In

Well worth a look:

The Centre for Immigration Policy Reform

THE inventor Sir James Dyson has warned that Chinese students are infiltrating British universities to steal technological and scientific secrets and even planting software bugs to relay the information to China.
Dyson, best known for inventing the bagless vacuum cleaner, said he had evidence that the bugs were left by postgraduates to ensure the thefts continued after they had returned home.
He said the extent to which foreign students dominated many science, technology and engineering research posts, often paid for by the British taxpayer, was “madness”.
[…]
“I’ve seen frightening examples. Bugs are even left in computers so that the information continues to be transmitted after the researchers have returned home.”
A number of such cases have been uncovered at British universities, with leading research institutions the most heavily targeted.

Or in the US. China ‘to overtake US on science’ in two years