I have to admire the honesty of this GTA landlord for being frank about the dilemma he faces now that variable rate mortgages carry a much higher interest payment.
Cultivating the Pull Peddlers
You’ve got to hand it to Sam on one issue: he knew exactly which political actors and media outlets to curry favor with. At least for a while, they’re going to do their best to draw attention away from his, ahem, more “questionable” schemes.
Harnessing the enormous wealth created by FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that Sam Bankman-Fried had founded, they undertook a project to spend potentially billions of dollars on pandemic prevention, a long-neglected priority on Capitol Hill even amid the coronavirus crisis. The plan, drawn from the brothers’ adherence to a philosophy called effective altruism, sought to maximize philanthropic giving in ways that can have the most impact.
In the months leading up to FTX’s crash, the Bankman-Frieds and their network had rapidly increased their spending on pandemic-prevention initiatives, according to a review of funding announcements, political donations and lobbying disclosures — record-breaking sums and unconventional choices that sometimes astounded political and public health experts.
House Cleaning
@PaulMitchell_AB Breaking: Alberta Premier Danielle Smith has fired the entire Alberta Health Services (AHS) Board of Directors.
A Family Affair!
When you start making 20 to 1 leveraged bets on cryptocurrencies buttressed with credit arrangements that could probably be described as financial incest, it’s only a matter of time until the whole house comes crashing down. Sounds a whole lot like the current arrangements between central banks and various treasuries.
At some point, FTX started accepting FTT as collateral. In the apt words of Matt Levine, accepting your own self-issued token as collateral is “very dark magic” and is almost certain to end badly.
FTX was faced with massive client withdrawals and rapidly falling prices of the collateral sitting on their balance sheet (namely FTT) at the same time.
The CEO called it a “liquidity crunch” (euphemism). A more accurate description would be sudden death capital implosion (they were likely insolvent before they were illiquid, and likely within 24 hours).
We lost all your money….sorry about that….
When interest rates plunged to zero, nearly everyone cheered the resultant soaring of asset prices and ignored how the value of pyramid schemes was soaring in tandem. Now that the music has stopped, it will take more than “sorry” to fix this.
“Last week Ikigai was caught up in the FTX collapse. We had a large majority of the hedge fund’s total assets on FTX,” Kling said on Twitter on Monday. “By the time we went to withdraw Monday morning, we got very little out. We’re now stuck alongside everyone else.”
“I lost my investors’ money after they put faith in me to manage risk and I am truly sorry for that. I have publicly endorsed FTX many times and I am truly sorry for that. I was wrong.”
Moving The Goalposts
If you can’t hit the target…
ZeroHedge- Goldman, TS Lombard Confirm Fed Inflation Target Hike Now Inevitable
Y2Kyoto: Pharaoh Way Places
To be green is to live without mirrors.
Burning capital
If solar panels on parking lots were a paying proposition, parking lot owners would be doing it already. Free standing solar panels are a proven money-loser as is, so the added cost of a structure to elevate them over a parking lot is just more destroyed capital. But in the People’s Republic of France, considerations like profit margin are either an irrelevant consideration or downright evil. Sounds a lot like Canada.
“Legislation approved by the French Senate this week requires existing and new car parks with space for at least 80 vehicles to be covered by solar panels. The owners of car parks with between 80 and 400 spaces have five years to comply with the measures, while operators of those with more than 400 will have just three years. At least half of the area of the larger sites must be covered by solar panels.”
Preparing the ground
When the head of the Bank of Canada openly admits that higher levels of joblessness are not only on the way, but absolutely necessary, you can be sure that unemployment will be much worse than they expect.
Hopefully, it won’t be you or a family member who gets “rebalanced”.
The governor said the country’s current low unemployment rate is not sustainable and is contributing to decades-high inflation.
He said the Canadian labour market needs to be rebalanced to stabilize inflation.
Hey Look, We Saved Healthcare…
oh, wait…
Maclean’s- State of Emergency: Inside Canada’s ER Crisis
A few months ago, a middle-aged woman in seemingly fine health came to my ER, feeling under the weather. She had called her family doctor, but he was booked up and couldn’t see her for six weeks. I treated her instead, and when I pulled up her records, I saw a recent scan ordered by that same doctor, the results of which she hadn’t yet learned: cancer, already too advanced to cure. It wasn’t just one tumour; they were everywhere. It was up to me to tell her she had a handful of months, at most, and she should start getting her affairs in order.
With friends like these…
This is a strange development for a nation supposedly fighting for freedom. Seizing private property on a vast scale without compensation sounds a lot like something Robert Mugabe would do. The current owners may have to wait a long time for payment, considering that the purchaser is bankrupt.
Ukraine government authorities vowed in the Monday statement that “After martial law is lifted, these assets may be returned to their owners or their value may be reimbursed.” And further, “These enterprises must operate 24 hours a day, seven days a week for the needs of the state’s defense.”
“In connection with military necessity, a decision was made to expropriate the assets of strategically important enterprises into state ownership,” the Secretary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council, Oleksiy Danilov, explained further in a joint presser.
He Doesn’t Think Much About Monetary Policy
If the US is anything to go by, he’s cruising to re-election:
According to Statistics Canada, consumer bankruptcies have surged 22.5% year-over-year.
The Q3 increase in consumer insolvencies was the largest percentage increase since 2009, when Canadians were being hit by the global financial crisis.
Whoever It Is This Week’s Britain
Where the foxes caper unmolested, the government packs your school lunch, and I was approached by a government agency to rent our whole hotel, full occupancy, 12 month rolling contract.
More here.
The end of entrepreneurship
When my rental property got to the point where it needed substantial upgrades, I took into consideration the hassles of chasing tenants for rent and concluded that it was best to have the fire department use it for a practice burn. I never regretted that decision.
Once the impact of rising interest rates fully collides with deadbeat tenants using the power of the state to delay eviction, there will be very little left of the rental housing market in this country.
Just last year, Marco had two houses to his name, but for months has been sleeping in his car — all because his tenants, whom he’s been unable to evict, haven’t paid their rent.
Marco, 33, lost his marital home in a separation agreement in January. He still owns an income property — a two-suite house in Collingwood, Ont. — but says his upstairs tenant hasn’t paid up since June; the one downstairs hasn’t since February.
(More rental tales in the comments – Kate)
Going down….
Will the slide of the Canadian dollar stop at 70 cents U.S.? Many SDA readers would consider this to be wishful thinking since the very problems that the article identifies are significantly worse for us than for our American cousins.
“Canada has roughly two times the reliance on real estate, has experienced a sharper correction, and has higher mortgages roll-over risks than the U.S.” said the economists.
TD estimates that by the end of the year, debt servicing costs for households will be 30 per cent higher than in the first quarter of 2021, with the average borrower spending an extra $2,500 a year just on debt.
Come On In
This immigration wave will add the equivalent of the entire population of Saskatchewan in just over two more years. Then it will add the equivalent population of Manitoba in just 3 more years after that. And it will keep on going.
The floodgates are open. pic.twitter.com/VN5GrmD2Vk
— Paul Mitchell (@PaulMitchell_AB) November 2, 2022
Enforcing Conformity
eugyppius- The Malign Influence of Head Girls
Our governing elite are increasingly selected not for intelligence or ability, but for conscientiousness, agreeability and conformity. The consequence is a new kind of midwit tyranny.
Modern society is run by Head Girls, of both sexes … Modern colleges aim at recruiting Head Girls, so do universities, so does science, so do the arts, so does the mass media, so does the legal profession, so does medicine, so does the military…
The Head Girl can never be a creative genius because she does what other people want by the standards they most value. She will worker harder and at a higher standard in doing whatever it is that social pressure tells her to do – and she will do this by whatever social standards prevail, only more thoroughly. …
But It’s Only a Hangnail?
Harsh lessons
I’ve heard many times that America “learned its lesson” from the real estate breakdown in 2008 and won’t repeat those mistakes again. It’s quite possible that this conclusion was completely wrong. In any case, whatever is happening down there will not miss Canada this time around.
The layoffs at Opendoor will … come in the wake of a sudden shift in prices that has forced the company (Nasdaq: OPEN) to sell homes for less than it paid for them.
Opendoor, which went public in December 2020, lost money on 42% of its transactions in August, and it warned investors that it expected to lose as much as $175 million in adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the third quarter.
Lab Rats And The Upcoming Election
Victor Davis Hanson explains that Americans were the lab rats, and leftists were the mad scientists.