Found this earlier tonight when I was researching 3M and their pension commitments.
Even if a company's liability for executives' pensions totals hundreds of millions of dollars, its employees and shareholders may never know. Companies don't have to report this obligation separately in federal financial filings.
In the case of pensions for regular employees, the expense is partly or wholly offset by investment returns on money the company set...
There is a lot of discussion of Canada's low productivity, but I've not been able to find anything quantitative about this topic. So I did my own calculations and have found some interesting results. I'd welcome comments.
What I'm trying to do is calculate the ratio of GDP compared to the total wages paid to produce that GDP. If the GDP is only the value of the input labour then that value would be 1. A value greater than 1 is a measure of...
The Fed raises it's target rate July 26, 2023
Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement For release at 2:00 p.m. EDT Share
Recent indicators suggest that economic activity has been expanding at a moderate pace. Job gains have been robust in recent months, and the unemployment rate has remained low. Inflation remains elevated.
The U.S. banking system is sound and resilient. Tighter credit conditions for households and businesses are likely to weigh...
The Bank of Canada today increased its target for the overnight rate to 5%, with the Bank Rate at 5¼% and the deposit rate at 5%. The Bank is also continuing its policy of quantitative tightening
This is an opinion piece which appeared in yesterday's G & M. It is behind the paywall.
Boeing’s woes are a perfect example of how nickel-and-diming ends up crushing a company
It is posted here as it applies to Financial News.
However as the author also notes.
To be sure, because of the scrutiny on Boeing, every incident is capturing media attention. It’s important to note that every day thousands of Boeing aircraft around the world...
CBC Marketwatch released this report about the big banks misleading customers and unethical behavior
There has been a history of evidence pointing to the banks putting sales ahead of the customers best interests and its unlikely to change despite clear rules in the Bank Act.
I wanted to hear any current opinions on the growth of FinTech firms in Canada. I understand there are regulatory changes coming to (hopefully) make it easier to interconnect with the big banks, and for smaller firms to compete in the tight regulatory environment. I welcome this change but also have some concerns.
Security : With the pervasive threat of security breaches, I am not sure that smaller firms can (or will) put enough effort into...
OTTAWA — Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland will present the federal budget on April 16, as cost-of-living issues continue to dominate Canadian politics.
Our economic plan is about building more homes, faster, making life more affordable, and creating more good jobs, Freeland said in a news release on Monday. The spending plan is coming at a time when high interest rates are putting a damper on the economy and ramping up fiscal pressure on the...
We keep hearing that Blackrock, Vanguard and State street control most of the stock market . Bernie Sandars, for example says this is an oligarchy, and a threat to democracy. He's not the only one.
How true is it? I'd always assumed (but not verfied) that shares held on behalf of an ETF are somehow held in trust. Are they? If they are, who is doing the sharehold voting for those companies. How much influence does Vanguard have, for example in...
It took some 34 years - recently Japan's Nikkei 225 crossed its 1989 record.
Don't know how that relates to real returns for Japanese domestic investors, the yen / currency exchange values for foreign investors.
As a long time member of the DUCA credit union (35+ years) which used to be a low key credit union, this report concerns me.
From today's G & M, behind the paywall.
Lead lender to Sam Mizrahi and Edward Rogers’ condo project alleges loan default, requests court-appointed receiver
In recent years DUCA has actively solicited deposits (see the mention of it in the thread in FWF on High Interest Savings and on RFD) which has involved a lot of...
It seems clear to me another lost decade is upon us in terms of investment returns. A massive recession is heading our way and the recent drawdown does not reflect that...merely it is multiple compression from extraordinary levels. It will be a long time (a decade at least) before we hit 4813 on S&P500 again. This got me thinking....well at least the S&P will generate dividends. So I looked back at previous lost decades being the 30's and the...
Tangerine is offering a free eBook of The Wealthy Barber Returns by David Chilton. The offer is supposed to be for Tangerine clients, but it looks like the link ( here ) is not restricted to clients.
Equity markets have yet to drop materially below their fair-value range, which they have historically done during recessions...The U.S. fair-value cyclically adjusted price/earnings ratio (CAPE) is based on a statistical model that corrects CAPE measures for the level of inflation and interest rates. The statistical model specification is a three-variable vector error correction model including equity-earnings yields, 10-year trailing inflation,...
Posted in the Bogleheads forum: Subject: IT’S TIME: REGISTER FOR THE 2023 BOGLEHEADS CONFERENCE
--------------------------
Oct. 13-15, 2023
Bethesda North Marriott Hotel & Conference Center
Rockville, MD (just outside of Washington, DC)
Click to register for the conference, book a hotel room at the special conference rate, view the speaker lineup, and find other key details details other on the conference. There are 500 slots for the...
Too much talk making the rounds about the ' R ' word to ignore
Some say we're already in it or feels like we're in it
Some say it will happen this year
Some say it will happen next year
Some say we haven't see the bottom yet, another 20-30 % to go
Some say it's a 50-50% chance of happening ....and so on
What say ye ? and what should we as Investors be doing about it ?
Presumably this is a good data source at
Shockingly LOW! After 10? rate hikes and giant mortgages that people are now carrying, If you click into the doc into the pdf there is no trended data but in 2018 for instance the arrears rate was around 0.25% and currently it is running around 0.15%. It has steadily fallen through the rise in rates.
Is that not shocking?
Link to an article by Robert Arnott et al (Research Affiliates) on momentum.
Points out that although momentum on paper has done very well, but in practice, less so.
They then discuss what can be done about this.
from 1928 to 2016. Suppose we buy a cap-weighted portfolio of the 20% of stocks that performed best in the last 12 months—excluding the latest month—and sell short a cap-weighted portfolio of the 20% of stocks that performed...
I'm curious as to your opinions in matters of financial stability for a couple in retirement.
Lets assume you own your home F&C and you decide to live in your current city throughout your golden years.
Are CPP/OAS/GIS enough to live comfortably? Or should they be supplemented/substituted with personal investments in Registered and Non-Registered investment assets (excluding principal residence)?
It was announced today Canadian securities regulators propose binding regime for investment-related disputes - Canadian Securities Administrators The Canadian Securities Administrators (CSA) today set out a proposed regulatory framework for an independent dispute resolution service whose decisions would be binding.
Under the proposed framework, it is expected that the Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments (OBSI) would be the designated...
We've had QE and QT and now I predict we'll soon have QF...Quantitative Forgiveness. Each year the Fed will simply write off a chunk of the Treasury Bonds it holds. A simple application of MMT and it will be a kind of QE. That will allow long rates to stay higher. Savers and foreign investors will get a better yield and not dump Treasuries. It will allow the US government to run high deficits without getting overwhelmed with debt and interest...
An interesting read this morning, Investors still don't believe in the new normal | Financial Post , particularly for those who might be early in their investing career and unfamiliar with high inflation .
In 2008, the runaway inflation of the 1980s and the painful medicine of record high rates required to subdue it were still relatively fresh in people’s minds.
At that time, had you asked anyone what would be the most likely result of...
I learned some sad news over the weekend, which was written up today in an Advisor.ca article - Former OSC commissioner Glorianne Stromberg dies .
That article links to her obit near the top. Oddly, I only spotted the notice in Saturday's physical Globe & Mail paper. I don't normally scan the deaths - though I do occasionally. And her name jumped off the page. It struck me as odd because she had died a week prior and I didn't recall seeing...
An interesting article from Australia ABC - the Australian Broadcasting Corporation slanted towards Australia's major exports to China of Steel and Coal.
I've been worried about growing American protectionism for some time now. The crop of American Congressmen and Senators elected in 2006 sounded decidedly anti-free-trade, and that is particularly worrying for Canada.
Now, with the threat of Buy American legislation before Congress, many others are worried. I know President Obama has made reassuring statements recently, but we have yet to see how strong his commitment to free trade is. And...
I notice some posts on uranium in the What did you buy thread.
Africa supplies most of the world with vast mineral resources including uranium yet remains the poorest continent on earth. Molly Gambhir of WION has all the statistics here.
There are forces at play in Africa that will reshape Global history within the next decade and have serious implications for the Western countries that rely on its mineral wealth. And the best military...
Ontario GDP/Cap now matches Alabama Unproductive civil servants and lack of resource industries probably hurts Ontario. And this was before Trudeau's hiring binge.
Remember when they said it was % of GDP that mattered?
IN HALF a century flat, America has transformed itself from the world's largest creditor into its biggest-ever debtor.
To fully grasp the risk this creates for the global financial system, we have to get a handle on how such a seismic shift occurred in the first place. The most common explanation offered these days, and that of the...
Saw a very interesting interview on Christianne Amanpour & Co on PBS a couple of days ago.
The US being a very litiginous society who knows where this will go.
Climate change is a crime
Before you dismiss this out of hand think back 40+ years and the tobacco industry. Nevertheless these corporations always manage to insulate themselves from major economic consequences eg Philip Morris and now their dominance of the packaged food industry,...
In another thread I just asked a technical financial question and joked that I had not yet asked ChatGPT - I then went and put the same question into ChatGPT and got what looks like a good answer.
It gave me a bit of a revelation - this is the future for search engines and Google must be having kittens?! Why bother with searching google multiple times visiting multiple web sites researching an answer - when AI can spit out a direct answer? I...
For the three quarters of 2005, according to the S&P SPIVA (S&P Indices Versus Active Funds scorecard) report issued today.
S&P/TSE Composite Index beat 86.6% of Canadian equity funds.
S&P 500 Index (in Canadian $) beat 62.4 % US Equity funds.
BUT
67.5 % o fCanadian Small Cap Equity funds beat the S&P/TSE Small Cap Index
After watching a few youtube videos, I have become a fan of Peter Zeihan. Perhaps it’s because I like to hear him talk about the upcoming collapse of both China and Russia, and the bright future of North America.
Has anyone read his book “The end of the world is just the beginning”?
What did you think of it?
Russia is hosting an international economic forum in St Petersburg this week. 130 countries are booked to attend. One of the subjects is Dedollarization: the future of money. The synopsis:
In today's multipolar world, we witness the gradual and profound integration of individual national economies into the global system of production and trade in goods and services. Nevertheless, as these integration processes unfold amidst a multipolar world...
An interesting read from Jonathan Clements Learned Along the Way - HumbleDollar IMAGINE YOU TOOK a group of folks—mostly male, mostly older, mostly upper-middle class, mostly well-educated—and had them describe their financial journey. They’d all be pretty similar, right? You might be surprised. I was.
There are many paths to the top of the mountain. Most journeys start haphazardly, trying one route and then another. But eventually,...
The Globe and Mail just reported on the results of the first month of its investment club. The picks of its readers blasted past the picks of the pundits:
Over the first month of the Investing Club challenge (to April 13), our portfolio of 11 hand-picked stocks has produced a total return of 4.4 per cent, which is pretty much in line with the performance of the S&P/TSX Composite Index during that same period.
Greetings everyone!
This morning at 8h30 the July inflation rate was announced: 8.5%.
Correct me if I am wrong but this means that the CPI for July 2022 was 8.5% higher than the CPI for July 2021.
This 8.5% is somewhat misleading because in reality the July CPI is the same as the June CPI.
Now here’s a toy example to think about.
Suppose that the CPI in Lalaland is constant, say at 100, for the 12 months of 2021.
Then suppose that the CPI jumps...
The Central Banks want 5% IR and 3% inflation (well they say 2 but that's a target). At 5% IR the cockroaches are beginning to come out...too much and too fast. The drop in bond values was immediate and it's taking out the banks now. Yes, deposits may be guaranteed but what about bank balance sheets and lending appetite. What is yet to come is the revaluation of real estate and alternate assets in a +5% IR world. That will be a slow train wreck....
As a former deputy minister of Finance – he was Paul Martin’s right-hand man in the deficit-busting 1990s – David Dodge would know a thing or three about misrepresenting the country’s finances. In those days the game was “hide the surplus”: Federal budgets serially understated the strength of the government’s fiscal position to fend off demands for more spending.
Dismiss MMT at Your Peril By Chris Brightman of Research Affiliates
Key Points
Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) argues that governments with fiat currencies should coordinate treasury and central bank actions to fund government programs by directly printing money, unconstrained by tax receipts or borrowing capacity.
Progressive politicians embrace MMT because the doctrine allows them to advocate substantial increases in social spending without...
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