It's insane this bank received a TON of support a few weeks back, yet this is their current standing. Anyone still thinking the dollar is stable is going to have a rude awakening in the coming years.
Yeah, I get the impression that US economy is in a far worse shape then people let on. One of the trends I've been watching is the rise in cost of living and personal debt. Last I looked, average American has around 100k debt, and over half the population is living paycheck to paycheck. The obvious extrapolation here is that a typical person cannot absorb further rise in the cost of living for much longer.
Meanwhile, the inflation is expected to continue rising despite fed attempts to bring it down by raising rates. Once the cost of living outpaces people's incomes then people will start defaulting on their debts. This in turns will cause more bank failures since the debt they own will become worthless. At that point we'll be looking at a similar scenario to 2008. Except this time it's not possible to just print more money to do a bailout due to inflation already being sky high. It'll be interesting to see what the plan here is, assuming there is one even.
Another reason the insane money printing done by the Fed was possible was the Petrodollar. Now that its being dropped like its hot, inflation most likely will have a little more umph to it and printing dollars will never be as easy to do, possibly ever.
I do think this is a new economic paradigm. Look at the economics of Silicon Valley, it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before. Most of the S&P 100 value is in tech, and these industries have several features that make them unique. Their products have a very high upfront cost and basically zero marginal cost. They can also change their products after they’ve sold them, and their products have feedback loops that not even they can understand.
It’s just supply side economics. Wealthy people have so much money that all of the good investments are already over funded. But they need to put all that money somewhere. So they put their money into bad investments and try to get it out before everyone else does before it becomes widely known that the books are being cooked.
So we end up with obvious scams like crypto currency, NFT, etc. The smart people got out of those things before anyone else and dumped it into AI like ChatGPT and used their control over to media to hype that up.
And then you have companies like Facebook and Apple that are way over valued, and need to invent new products lines. So we end up with things like the Metaverse and “Apple Vision Pro.” Products that only the wealthy think is a good idea but don’t make sense for people that are struggling to pay thew rent.
Netflix has topped out on subscribers. Which would normally be fine, they have solid revenue, and could have a sensible budget for creating new content, have solid profits that they could send to investors as dividends. That’s how it used to work, but you aren’t going to get billionaire over-investment without promising MASSIVE GROWTH in the future. So they’re trying to come up with bullshit schemes that will theoretically shake down their customers for more money so they can project more profit.
And you got reddit, similarly coming up with a scheme that theoretically will result in a lot of revenue, so they can project for future profit.
Essentially, bullshit is the product now. The goal is to entice billionaires to dump the vast amounts of money they don’t know what to do with into your company.
We got the Metaverse, some pictures of bored monkeys, some VR headsets (that no one can afford) that have the functionality of a phone. And we got the general enshittification of everything.
Supply side economics. Does it feel like this way of doing things is working well?
To start with, there would be yet another blue-ribbon advisory panel made up of ethnically, regionally, occupationally and gender diverse worthies who nevertheless somehow hew to the same monochromatically pink interventionist line.
These days the growth jobs seem to be among communications people, lobbyists, diversity officers, ethicists, ESG specialists and so on.
In deference to modern mores, I’d probably suggest changing “he” to “she”
This guy really doesn’t like women and minorities making decisions.
This guy needs to chill. Diverse workplaces have been shown to be more productive, so it really doesn’t matter what individuals do because the company’s goal is to make money by maximizing worker productivity.
Eh. The number of businesses that choose controlling people over making more money leads me to believe that businesses actually exist to give business owners and management an outlet to engage in their petty power fantasies.
Maybe if companies could settle their offices elsewhere than the three major city centers, Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, there could also be more space to develop and other labour available from that region.
We wouldn’t need to build big high-rise condo projects with nothing but 500 square foot single bedroom apartments due to land constraints.
I admit I just skimmed it, but a worker shortage actually is mentioned.
Yeah, material shortages are harder, but they’re kind of a short term thing due to plant shutdowns and forestry disruptions. I wonder how forestry is going to adapt as the tree line moves north.
Here in BC, record forest fires year after year are certainly having an impact, although the mountain pine beetle fallout is finally also coming to fruition.
It was open season on beetle killed timber for over a decade, creating a glut of timber supply. It’s just going to go to waste anyways (up in smoke a fair amount as well). I think most of that beetle kill is done with now, or at least the easier logged stuff.
If we kept up on replanting, it usually takes 20-40 years for most of the tree species harvested in BC to mature, so those replanted trees wouldn’t be mature for another 10+ years anyways. Now throw in the heat dome, droughts, etc. and it just gets more fun (and fiery).
I’m not a forester or silviculturist, and I’m not on the logging side of the business, but my impression is that there just isn’t going to be as much cheap lumber available in BC, potentially ever. I would chalk a large part of this to global warming, right from the original pine beetle infestation. This means that the underlying problem is bigger than the government of BC can fix on it’s own, but I would have hoped to see more vigour in a push for climate action from the people of BC, specifically those whose forest industry jobs are threatened.
We are living during times of excess prosperity but somehow we can't afford to provide needed services to the population... where is all the money going?
Average house size in 1960 was roughly 1000 sq ft. Average house size now is roughly two and a half times larger. We've also gone from a near universal 8ft ceiling height to trendy 10ft ceilings. We're using far more material per unit, even as family sizes have never been smaller.
At some point people have to pay attention to consumption habits.
There's still plenty of scope for corporate shenanigans on top of all that, but they're not the whole story.
I think some of that is a catch 22: At one point I went from a 1000sq ft house (built in 1956) to a 2500sq ft house (built in 1985). I had a pile of empty rooms, so ended up filling the space with more stuff, stuff that was almost never used.
I changed cities and went down to a 1000sq ft condo. I was kinda stunned by all the extra crap that I had accumulated that was absolutely useless. Ended up giving a pile of stuff to thrift stores and sold some.
My impression is that developers like to build more premium housing because they can sell it for higher margins. This is probably a symptom of “houses for investment” vs. “houses for homes”. How much my house is worth is largely hypothetical if I’m living in it. I have to live somewhere after all, and if I sell it, I just have to live somewhere else.
To clarify the homebuilding costs are increasing that much isn’t because of the population growth.
Additional demand on building materials might push up the prices slightly, but the higher building costs are a result of inflation, higher interest rates and unfilled jobs in the construction industry.
Yep. One of the problems with relying on interest rates to curb inflation, is that interest rate hikes also make it more expensive to increase supply, ie build more houses (hence stagflation).
I think fundamentally the surge in inflation we are seeing is a supply side issue, less stuff but same or more demand. Between the pandemic and ensuing supply-chain disruptions to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has to have been a pretty sustained and severe loss of stuff (especially food) being made with all the resulting increases in prices.
Specifically wrt to housing construction costs in Canada, we should be able to insulate ourselves from much of those bigger underlying problems. The problem also isn’t housing costs, that’s the symptom. The problem is that housing is expensive.
The article is mostly descriptive of the problems, and it seems more or less on the mark. Not addressed though, and something I ponder, is the role of “housing as an investment” vs. “Housing as a necessity”. Developers like to build big expensive houses for higher returns it seems, where what we need is more middle density housing. I think it’s getting better, but the article doesn’t really go into what sort of houses are being built. Still the problems with lumber supply and concrete will apply no matter what.
Ah yes, let’s listen to a bank-owned economist about why new home values actually need to be going up. Sure there’s no vested interest there, from the guys who sell you your mortgage 🥴
This FinPost article is very thin. Not exactly providing adequate information for their target financial market readers.
I appreciate the OP’s effort to bring a diversity of news sources here, but this isn’t a particularly useful article other than to flag the announcement.
The Ontario government news release itself has more contextual information despite being written to promote the decision to consider an expansion.
The CBC story weighs some of the risks and concerns.
Hopefully this can start a trend. Nuclear is much cleaner than fossil fuels could ever hope to be, and it puts less radioactivity into the atmosphere than coal.
Also we have literal shit tons of raw ore, and if they use reactors that use recycled fuel rods the waste issue becomes easy to manage.
financialpost.com
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