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Please read my latest entry and post your comments here:
http://pensionpulse.blogspot.com/2010/03/david-dodge-calls-for-pension-reform.html
Thank you,
Leo Kolivakis
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Just take a look at the markets now. There's no investment - there's speculation, gambling. We see financial institutions making money off prop trading, off placement fees, off services...but not off loans.
Look at equities. The TA market technicians are at wit's end, scratching their heads with their tails, wondering WHY it hasn't plunged yet. Valuations!! They scream. P/E multiples....! This is irrational, they bellow...! Impossible! But equities - and RISK - will go higher and higher this year I predict.
What we are seeing is a desperate search for any yield at all. Any chance of a yield, given that the traditional drivers of lending/borrowing and property-backed earnings have collapsed. Bank deposits pay next-to-nothing. Money markets ditto.
But the long-term growth picture is different now. We are Japan in 1991. No more 5% per year, let alone 10%...from now on, a nominal 2-3% will be doing well, if achieved on a consistent basis, and every investment - EVERY one! - will bear 24-hour watching. Fingers on the 'sell' button. Individual equities may increasingly soar and plunge within a couple of days. Hair trigger advice goes for individuals, firms AND pension funds.
Get ready for: Lower Living Standards, G-8...
A lower standard of living would be a mild repercussion considering what the "M(B)aster(d)s of the Universe" have done to the global economy.
The former Nortel employees will sadly not be helpd by pipe smoking David Dodge and his calls for taxpayer subsidies of employees who enjoyed the good times of the dot com bubble and a culture of greed (not the current recession as Dodge implies) and who are not prepared to accept the responsibility for working for an unsound enterprise.
Indeed, my neighbour who was an 800k+++ engineer at Nortel deserves to be bailed out by the older lady down the lane who lives on a fixed income and will have to sell her home of 38 years due to ever increasing taxes (to support deadbeat corporations and their me first (former) employees).
Leo your left of left (progressive) politics pollute your otherwise insightful posts. I suggest that you also submit your articles to HuffPo, Kos and even barackobama.com ...
I am neither left or right. On some issues, I can make conservatives blush, and on others liberals blush.
Thanks Leo
The difference between Canada and the US is that us Canadians can have a rational debate on the issue and agree what is in the common good quickly. Increases in CPP a few years ago are an example. Barely a whimper here since everyone realized this was the right thing to do. Fortunately we adopted the British parlimentarian system and not that Senate/Congress/Lobbyist/President mess the US has. Changes can be made with a simple majority without the 20 to 1 lobbyists that the US system suffers from. I suspect a health tax will come out of this which likely is the right answer. The Yanks think they won the revolution but the political system they put in place makes them losers instead. Then they had the misfortune to listen to Reagan/Ayn Rand/Greenspan. Being in the top 1% of earners (ie. taxpayers) in Canada does not change my perspective. A nation built on compromise and good governance and not guns and guts.
Doug Beattie
Douglas enjoy your status in the top 1% whilst you pay a marginal rate of income tax just shy of 50%. Tell me when your tenants come up short on their monthly rent do you cut them some slack? And your "clients", do they get the prescribed 15 minutes and in Canada's socialist system to they need to take a number? Doug remind us where you got your some of your professional education? Perhaps you would be willing to share why you had to go to go offshore.
Do you have any advice for the Canadian patient waiting for a CT after a series of convlusions earlier this winter? And that damn lesion on my arm, which the GP at the walk in clinic two months ago suggested was just a bug bite - but it just isn't healing. Finally convinced him to allow me to get an appointment with the dermatogolist but wouldn't you know it, she will be in Italy for July and is booked solid until late September. My wife has a question for you, any chance you could use your influence to get her a family doctor. Her doctor at the ripe old age of 53 retired. So far she has put in appications to three different doctors her friends have suggested but they are not taking new patients.
I'll wait, with you, for an answer.......tick, tick, tick.
The difference between Canada and unUnited States is 330,000,000 million LESSSSS peeple fer crying out loud.
You who insist on comparing a nation 10 times the size of yours are insane.
Actually I think the US is a great nation that has allowed itself to be captured by a million or so special interests which is a real shame. Two generations ago half our family moved to the US and the current generation there are involved in real estate in Stockton, lawyers chasing automobile wrecks and sales people pushing drugs on doctors. ie. national wealth neutral at best but more than likely wealth destoyers. The other half in Canada are doing things like drilling oil wells, mining and farming. ie. wealth creators. Much dirtier I can attest to personally but this place is booming. Are there too many fruit flies in the jar in the US? I suspect so, but if the rants on Fox News are now accepted as doctrine in the US mainstream I fear for your future. Doing your neighbors laundry is not sustainable. I think Krugman is on the money but you will label me a liberal when I am in fact a Conservative (in the Canadian context at least). So we all hope you get your collective act together. And soon.
A once great nation of 400,000,000 people growing to 500,000,000 is not sustainable let alone governable, and no such thing at all as a Collective. We have turned into a nation mostly of adolescents, overfed, underoccupied, with TV, other video amusements, and mindless distractions from tackling serious problems, like posting endlessly on these blogs.
The only possibility of actual governance---not as it is now--- a nation absorbed with how to get around our corrupt-to-the-core-governance since it is our domestic enemy---is thru conversion to full blown communism.
WHY? BECAUSE THERE ARE NO JOBS that will absorb the population now with companies exporting them by the millions. With a national healthcare debacle possibly about to descend like the Sword of Damocles upon us, the prospects for pure survival overwhelm and swamp the potential for prosperity, year by year.
It's a done deal with only the funeral to be held. Smart people who are pioneering, are moving out, going to places that have a hope of growth.
And BTW what you are all doing in Canada by digging up your resources and shipping them to China--that is essentially the same thing as we did in extracting all our domestic oil and consuming it: You are hollowing out the very earth you stand on, and taking the ridiculously dunderheaded view that you are creating Wealth! Talk about denial! And Krugman knows no more than that little kid in the E-trade TV commercials, or Bart Simpson. Like most others, he, like most others with a butt hole, has an opinion and only that.
WADR.
With the average lifespan increasing, working longer is common sense.
PROVIDED there is enough work for them to do to stay off the pension payments.
The real challenge is going to be finding enough work for ANYONE to do that pays a decent wage for them to earn their way. And with 6,000,000,000 people on the planet, growing to 7,000,000,000 thru mindless reproduction in the third world and welfare states, that's going to be an impossible task.
The solutions, pick only one, though no one is really interested in the facts, is to 1) fuck with some sense of the horrendous consequences that this behavior has already caused on a finite planet, or 2) find real Creators of well-paid job, JObs, JOBS!!!
Canadians will have to be "adult" enough to accept retiring "later than they had hoped," rather than planned in good faith founded on their own contributions to the plan. . . and people are gonna just take that?
Like stealing candy from a baby, I guess. Or at least the "adults" seem to think so.