The crux of the lawsuit centers around GM’s use of technology installed in most vehicles manufactured since 2015. This technology allegedly collects, records, analyzes, and transmits detailed driving data every time a driver uses their vehicle, according to the press release.
The Recession Is Knocking
Monetary system analyst Rafi Farber makes a pretty convincing case that a recession is imminent, based on some recent action in the banking system and also by looking at the inverted yield curve (short term interest rates above longer term rates). In a nutshell, the recession occurs not when the yield curve inverts, but after it un-inverts and goes back to its normal upward slope. We’ll know if he’s right or not within a few months. Interestingly, he doesn’t see us bouncing back from this downturn.
“…we had an inverted yield curve until… June 2007… and from there it uninverted fully and we were in a recession by January 2008… 6 months…now we’re about to cross the threshold here again we’re at… four basis points below 0.04% means we could cross into positive territory any day….we’ve been negative since June 2022 right that for over a year now which is the longest we had a negative yield curve ever… we have a few months before this fully un inverts and we are back into the final recession of this monetary system…”
The New Economy
It’s a basic principle of economics that price controls negatively affect supply. But apparently that did not occur to the BC government when they decided to clamp down on Airbnb entrepreneurs. That, combined with the tapped out marginal consumer saying no to outrageous hotel and restaurant prices, is having some unpleasant effects.
Kelowna Boat Rentals has been booked solid in past years from July through August, but this year is different.
“Business has definitely been a little down this year. I think it’s mostly because of that Airbnb ban. That seems to be it. It’s kind of a ghost town down here compared to usual,” said Tom Entwistle, manager at Kelowna Boat Rentals.
“Last year was slightly slower, but we were still pretty much fully booked every day, and then this year we are at about 70 per cent capacity during the weekdays,” said Entwistle.
Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble
@ShaziGoalie; (link fixed)
Two detached homes, one in Brampton and the other in Milton, bought at the same time in 2022 (over asking), sold days ago for whopping $430k+ losses .
This is starting to snowball folks.
And The Plumbing Will Fix Itself
Some 700,000 of Canada’s 4 million skilled tradespeople are set to retire by 2028, according to recent projections. At least one-third of tradespeople and apprentices in Ontario are 55 or older. And as older workers hang up their tools, they’re not being replaced with younger ones who bring matching skills to the job site.
Good Proletarians Don’t Need Vacations
Slumping sales in the accommodation sector will come as no surprise to anyone who has taken note of the soaring cost of all aspects of travel in the past couple of years. The marginal consumer cannot afford any of it.
Airbnb shares dropped 14% in after-hours trading after the company reported second-quarter earnings that missed analyst expectations and warned that it’s seeing signs of slowing demand from U.S. customers.
“Decline Is A Process, Not A Moment”
The critic- Boiling the British frog
On July 11th, the new Labour government announced that 5,000 prisoners would be released early, in order to ease prison overcrowding. On July 15th, reports emerged that London’s once-great Metropolitan Police had failed to solve a single burglary, phone theft, or car theft in 166 London neighbourhoods over the past three years. On July 17th, a Jordanian refugee who attacked a female police officer in Bournemouth was spared community service on the grounds that he could not speak English — and on July 18th, two asylum seekers from Egypt who stole a watch worth £25,000 in London’s West End were spared jail.
That same day saw two separate cases of rioting. In the Harehills area of Leeds, police were attacked and a double-decker bus was set on fire by local residents after four Romani children were taken into care by social services. In East London’s plurality-Bangladeshi borough of Tower Hamlets, rioting broke out in response to political unrest in Bangladesh.
Let me stress this again — all of these incidents took place within the space of a single week.
Konstantin Kisin- Riots in Britain: Nothing Left to Add
In all of these pieces, I explained that government policy across the Western world over the last two decades had brought the pot to boiling point. And predicted that instead of turning off the gas and listening to people’s concerns, the reaction from the media and politicians would be to screw the lid on tighter and make things worse. Which they have now done.
Gradually, Then Suddenly
Don’t worry, it’s temporary. US Manufacturing Surveys Collapsed In July
We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Sparky Buses
Many more such blows to the EV market and there’ll be nothing left of it except for an enormous debt to taxpayers and “temporarily” permanent job losses.
The electric bus company says some 300 employees will be let go in the coming days in a 30 per cent cut to its workforce. It expects most of the layoffs to be temporary.
Lion Electric previously laid off about 220 employees in a pair of announcements in February and April.
My Debt Engine Is Running Rough
In an economy as utterly dependent on housing as Canada’s this is the kind of news that grabs headlines. Even if the recent interest rate hikes are over and rate cuts continue, servicing the debt burden piled up during the lengthy near-zero era makes a quick recovery impossible.
The number of housing starts in the first half of 2024 has lagged behind the previous year, while June saw a 44-per cent drop year-on-year. At the same time, new home sales — which can predict future home construction — are also falling.
Data from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) shows that, between January and June, 36,371 new homes were started in areas of Ontario with more than 10,000 residents. Those figures were a 14-per cent decrease from the previous year.
Last month, the CMHC reported particularly dire figures. In June 2023, 10,114 new homes were started in Ontario, while this year that plummeted to 5,681.
That Sinking Feeling
So the Bank of Canada cut interest rates again and dropped hints that more are on the way? So much for “normalizing” rates. But when your monetary system consists of an irredeemable fiat currency in which debt grows exponentially both by design and by intention, the only way to avoid widespread default and banking system collapse is by continually cutting interest rates. We’re on our way back to zero.
David Rosenberg, founder and president of Rosenberg Research & Associates Inc., said the central bank is behind on rate cuts and has a long way to go to bring balance back to the economy.
“The Bank of Canada is hardly done. This is the early stage of what will prove to be more than just a partial unwind of the most severe tightening cycle since the John Crow era of the late 1980s,” he said in a note to clients. “When you model out where the overnight rate should be in such a period of economic slack, it should be closer to two per cent than 4.5 per cent.”
It’s Probably Nothing
The Canadian economy is in trouble. A thread.
No Retirement For You!
Not to worry. When mark to market won’t give you the results you want, just mark to book value. If need be, fill the balance sheet with made up numbers. That’s sure to safeguard your retirement savings.
Canada’s large pensions are facing rising losses from real estate investments, according to a sector report by Fitch Ratings Inc., which concluded that fund titans are nevertheless well-positioned to absorb near-term market swings.
The ratings agency said it has not seen widespread private credit losses, though defaults are likely to tick up for the remainder of this year and into 2025 given higher debt service burdens for underlying borrowers and slowing growth.
Where’s My Stuff?
Blacklocks- Freight Costs Way Up: Report
“the average end to end container transit time as measured from Shanghai through the Port of Vancouver to Chicago increased from an average of 25.4 days in 2019 to 29.1 days in 2020 and 33.8 days in 2021.” All customers paid,
“The price of maritime container shipping rose 385 percent or more than fourfold from November 2020 to September 2021,” wrote the department. “Delays at ports mean that goods must wait on ships longer which causes prices to increase but also reduces availability of shipping
Canadian Tired
Best Healthcare System In The World
We need more administrators with higher salaries that should be paid for by higher taxes on primary health care providers. Easy peasy.
Canadian Press- Nova Scotia emergency department deaths hit six-year high, doctors point to ‘bed-blocking’
Retired doctor Robert Martel, who worked in Nova Scotia ERs for decades, says many beds in emergency departments are blocked because they are occupied by patients who can’t get a spot in long-term care or who need community services. He says patients are also showing up at emergency rooms far sicker than they should be, because they don’t have a regular doctor who could have detected their illness earlier.
I Need More Stimulus!!
Economic growth predictions are notoriously hard to make accurately, but at some point saddling the economy with destructive mandates and borrowing to fund politically motivated boondoggles has to be reckoned with. It’s not a matter of if, but when.
Berezin expects that recession to begin either later this year or in early 2025.
He rattled off a number of indicators suggesting that the torrid pace of pandemic-era hiring has given way to something far less appealing to workers. As official job-openings data show, the number of open positions have fallen substantially, as has the quit rate. And private surveys of job openings reflect an even more dramatic decline.
And The Budget Will Balance Itself
“Why can’t I have a real Finance Minister?”
But The Rainbow Crosswalks Look Great
National Post- Millions down the drain: Water tech company says Calgary’s problems go beyond recent break
According to the city’s website, the average water use in Calgary was approximately 350 litres per person per day in 2023. However, Water Online estimates that 20 to 30 per cent of this water is regularly lost due to leaks and aging infrastructure, as per the national average.
A 2019 National Research Council report found that 30 per cent of Canada’s water and wastewater infrastructure is at or beyond its service life, The Globe and Mail reports.
Blind To The Obvious
Is there anything more frustrating than some court economist declaring that we face serious economic problems but the causes are just a bewildering puzzle that largely defy explanation? Just for starters, Tiff need look no further than the current federal government’s open hostility towards investors.
At the conference, Macklem said the central bank expected productivity growth to pick up coming out of the pandemic as companies found the workers they wanted to hire and the supply chain started to normalize.
“It hasn’t happened,” he said. “That’s why we made such a stark statement.”
The solutions are apparent — more investment in machinery, equipment, information technology, etc. — but Macklem said the tougher question is why that isn’t happening.
“There are some puzzles there,” he said. “We have all the ingredients; we have got to cut through obstacles.”