The Cash Cow!

Hey look Gordo, The cow is jumping over the moon!!!

Scampbell

Privitize the profits and socialize the losses!

I heard on the news wire today,apparently all the provincial finance ministers met with Flaherty.

As usual Ontario and Quebec are getting large sums of money through provincial equalization.

Alberta,Saskatewan,Newfoundland and BC are getting nothing!

According to Hansen,we are one of the have provinces.

Well you could of fooled me, Here we are in deficit and we are a have province.

Campbell and Hansen have lied so much about the state of the BC books that we get nothing!
Those lies will come back to haunt Campbell, with the feds virtualy broke we are own our own when it comes to infrastructure,olympic security or anything from the feds.

All Campbell`s corporate giveaways,land giveaways,hydro giveaways,P3s,are all going to come home to roost.

Campbell`s form of free trade/no regulations,privitization only works if prices on housing,commodities,utilities goes up for ever.

Campbell talks about how BC will weather the storm better than other provinces,Campbell is dead wrong,we will be hit harder than any province in Canada! There is nothing to fall back on,Campbell has given away the forest sector,Campbell has given away any potential for the province to make big money on utilities!

The P3s he has committed us to are at a tremendous rip-off price,Zinc.copper,metals are terrible thing to basa an economy on,prices drop,mines close.

All Campbell has left is to sell BC at fire sale prices!

GOD HAVE MERCY ON BC

PEOPLE WILL BE BEGGING FOR THE "DOOM AND GLOOM OF THE 90S"

Canada isn't that bad of a place

My own feeling is that Canada should be a free trade area, where Canadian citizens can move freely anywhere, to do anything, anytime, consistent with the laws of Canada. I see myself as Canadian.

It isn't that bad of a place.

A recent survey conducted by the World Economic Forum found that it was the opinion of those surveyed that Canada's banking system is the strongest in the world.

I'm not sure what you are so concerned about that goes on in Canada that a province would want to protect itself from on the financial regulation front.

The danger inherent in "credit default swaps", which is unregulated credit insurance, has suddenly come to be appreciated by central bankers all over the world. The problems caused by the "collateralized debt obligations" are more generally known but they too have only recently been seen as a major threat.

It is to Quebec's credit that they have been moving toward regulating "derivatives" for some time. It is worth noting that a common derivative is the insurance many Canadians have on their homes.

In the present environment, any really good plan is quickly copied as this crisis requires immediate action. The UK government plan put forward by Gordon Brown quickly came to be seen as a template to address the immediate problem of bank solvency and it was quickly copied in the EU and the US modified their plan to become much like it.

Quebec seems to be moving in this area to encourage the dominance of Montreal in derivatives trading, rather than taking a lead position in solving a fundamental flaw in international finance.

This is the major financial crisis since 1929 and no one is going to go after Quebec because everyone else is groping in the dark wondering what the solution is.

What would be good in Canada would be to have regulations that were consistent across the country.

Your attitude seems to be that British Columbians ought to feel like they are an independent country. Maybe you should call for an independent BC.

I'm for Canada. I think political effort is required to forge larger relationships leading to world government and that's where energy should go. Why appeal to narrow interests aimed at picking apart what exists? There are grave problems in front of us: global environment issues, newly evolved disease, poverty, nuclear proliferation, and terrorism are calling out for global solutions.

Champ or Chump

Its no wonder deregulate is hot on the premier's list of important things to do for VIPs or better yet friends of the premiers. And these friends, Oil that is and Energy and are now pumping Canadians lands to keep Americans in energy as Canada takes on her role as major supplier to America. And whats that mean to our environment? Well first the oil mud is destroying our environment or rather the carbon its producing is big thime not to mention all the energy we sell to the USA and all the carbon it produces. The Champ makes you feel like a chump went it comes to the whole carbon tax thing as advertising companies rake in the benefits and not the environment? Does that mean if the OIl companies are unable to proceed with destroying our environment BC is know liable for anticipated profits along with hefty fines. It more like ILLMUD rather than TILMA and Mr. Campbell is going have one hard sell.

Frank

There is no such thing as a provincial Liberal party.

And your right about BC being hit the hardest

And its why we pay the Champion the big bucks so during an economic meltdown we get hit the hardest. What can he cut back that he hasn't already stripped of its ability to perform its necessary services? Business will have to deal with the economy while struggling with the carbon tax and high rents making the cost of doing business impossible. Words of the day will be job loss, foreclosure,receivership, and bankruptcy. We sure know how to pick em and we sure know how to pay them, or in this case the Champ paid himself and his Liberal gang an unprecedented raise because he could. And lets not forget the high cost of putting on the Olympics as BC gets ready to put on its party to the world now thats gotta cost its not going to be any picnic with housing price expecting to drop as much as 33%.

Capitalism is Extortion

http://politicsrespun.org/2008/10/03/capitalism-as-extortion-700000000000-ways/

I wrote this a month ago and its even more relevant now. The whole model, neoliberalism especially is based on social extortion.

David Lewis - part 1

I would like to agree with you that Canada ought to be a free-trade area for Canadians, but it wasn't set up that way in 1867, for what seemed to be very appealing reasons at the time. Each region felt that its uniqueness would be subsumed by the financial clout of Upper Canada and its capital and resources (including people and finances) plundered to support the wealth-making enterprises in Upper Canada.

It was a very real fear, as it turned out. At different times, each territory in the nation has thought of itself as the "breadbasket" of the nation for one or another of its resources, and wished to be out of confederation altogether so as to be able to use its resources for its own betterment instead of giving it to those wastrels elsewhere in the country.

So we developed a federal system of provinces, divvied up the jurisdictions, and tried like hell to keep one level of government from taking over the duties of another ever since.

This is my problem with your thoughts on not only people moving anywhere they want in the country to do what they want consistent with the laws of the country - you then also have to let the rest of the factors of production do what they want as well - including financial capital.

David Lewis - part 2

Capital is one of the four factors of production. The other three are land, labour, and organization or management. If you're missing any one of the four, you have no production, and quality of life suffers for all.

You can't move the land. No problem.

You can move organization or management, but if society is sufficiently free, entrepreneurship will arise (or move in from elsewhere) to supply the missing ingredient.

You can move labour - people are entitled to move to take different jobs, and in the past twenty years, there has been some effort put into harmonizing credentials between the provinces so that a doctor or a plumber in BC can also apply to practice in Nova Scotia with a minimum of fuss. It's a big deal to uproot labour, though, and it happens slowly. Thank goodness, or else Newfoundland would be empty. Big swings in labour are never good - leads to a lot of unemployed men 'riding the rails' like my grandfather from '33 to '36.

But, unfortunately, you can move capital. In an eyeblink. A trillion dollars in assets can be transferred to the ownership of others and put to service of other regions or other countries without so much as a by-your-leave. Even physical capital disappears quickly - when Squamish Pulp and Paper went out of business two years ago, several proposals were made to purchase the machinery and continue production - of power (with the powerhouse and the river penstocks), and of paper. But the high bidders (China) elected to take all that capital out of the country and ship it to China. 600 people out of work. Land, labour and organization available, but no capital to do it with. And as a result, all of BC suffers. Just like when raw logs leave the country.

What's the fair solution?

Me, personally, I think there ought to be some restrictions on the free movement of capital. I just don't know what they ought to be without getting all Marxist about it.

Thoughts?

Insurance

Incidentally, I'm not sure what you're talking about with respect to one's own home insurance policy being a derivative.

Insurance is in a class of its own - it's quite unlike a derivative, in that the policy is a renewable contract at fixed actuarial values for a range of risks that may include derivative risks (such as earthquakes) rather than a single contract for a single risk (like a weather derivative).

Unless your house insurance policy is only to cover you against earthquakes, and not against third party risks, fire, theft, vandalism, water damage, loss or misplaced valuables, and all subject to depreciation.

Interesting, isn't it, that insurers, and especially reinsurers have made so little use of derivatives themselves, preferring to manage interest rate risk with them, but only 7-12% of the time, as Stephen d'Arcy at U of Illinois pointed out a few years ago. What do they know that the rest of us don't? (Or that AIG failed to learn?)

dgiVista.org

I don't normally follow links, especially when they're long and convoluted, but yours was well-written - congratulations. However, I don't agree with your diagnosis, though your prescription is valid.

Your diagnosis focuses a little too much on the individual types of cancer that society has been battling of late, and not enough on the systemic cancer underlying it all.

Society has not controlled its money supply (the means by which all citizens settle their debts with each other) properly. It has allowed the money supply (not just printed money but M1, M2 and M3 - all cash and cash equivalents including debt and securities) to expand beyond the outputs of production.

In other words, if we were capable of arbitrarily measuring the output of our nation - all the capital and labour and intellectual rigour and education and land value and resources that we've put into manufacturing "stuff" for ourselves and others (and that includes health care and education) and call that value (x), I suggest our money would have exceeded that value by (x + n). Correspondingly, the value of assets we own, would have been devalued at the same rate.

Results? Unproductivity, unemployment, waste, pollution, inflation, and ultimately poverty and illness.

I agree your third prescription is of critical importance and must be addressed immediately, with insurance substituting to manage reasonable risk (rather than reducing liability on risk-takers), but I suggest one additional prescription: That society must immediately undertake to measure all its inputs and outputs, and not to allow its money supply to grow beyond that fixed limit each year.

The hidden benefit in this is that the country that does this will have the one truly stable currency, the one that cannot be forced against the market by speculation, because the measurement of inputs and outputs will always be known. Imagine the power inherent in such a currency!

And if you can't, just imagine the power of the Swiss franc during WWII.

TILMA-NAFTA-CAFTA=DEATH TO FREEDOM!

Why is it, that morons the world over are ruining everything our fathers and fore-fathers have worked so hard to build up?
Answer: Because the offspring had everything handed to them and are now drugged, asleep and/or comatose!
What does it take to wake everybody up and take charge of life?
Answer: We are seeing more and more of the so called "iceberg", whose tip was kept from view because of foggy minds everywhere.
Why are politicians generally despised?
Answer: Because they are pond scum.
If one ever studied what happens to pond scum, one will find, that a really good storm can clean up the mess!
So, people, lets get cracking and stop standing around without action! Let us start by holding the politicians feet to the proverbial fire and say "enough already, stop tearing things down and rebuild!"

derivatives

I've only started studying derivatives as it became clear to me that many blamed the current global economic crisis on them. It immediately became apparent that these are the instruments Buffet described as financial weapons of mass destruction, at the same time Greenspan was saying they were so wonderful they had reduced risk in the financial system to almost zero.

Obviously, there is confusion about what they are. Krugmans blog contains an exchange as late as December 28 2007 indicating Krugman did not understand how the losses in the CDO ("collateralized debt obligations", the famous by now sliced and diced mortgage backed securities) market could end up being many times the total of the bad mortgage backed paper, which seems to indicate that in the inner circles where the best economists in the world travel, they only started to hear the warning voices about CDSs ("credit default swaps" so called "swaps" simply to avoid the label insurance which is what they are, to escape notice in broad daylight of the insurance regulators) by around that date. Because a CDS is just like an insurance policy sold on your own home to you, only it allows ten or any number of other people to also buy policies on your home that pay them if your home burns down, this is what the Krugmans of the world did not pay attention to until earlier this year, after $60 trillion or so of these what must be called side bets at the big casino by now existed, so that when a big company defaults a new element occurs in the financial system, more defaults in very widely dispersed locations as the "credit event" of the initial default triggers CDS payments many times the size of the original default.

Anyway, as soon as you head over to do the initial "derivatives" research, you get the basic explanation, and they say it is just like insurance on your home, and they say insurance on your home is a derivative.

I had just avoided any discussion of "derivative" up to this point as I thought it meant some complicated mathematics was involved that are beyond my pay grade, especially given that I don't currently have a job. But it isn't that way at all. Derivative in financial terms means the value of the contract derives from its relationship to something else. It doesn't have to be a complex mathematical relationship, although it can be.

capitalism

If I say I support strengthening Canada rather than weakening it in favour of a more independent BC it isn't because I believe the economic system in either place is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

According to my reading of history, the revolution in the USSR way back when in 1917 was regarded as a grand experiment by intellectuals all over the world, a great hope, that at last a system would be built that did not value capital over human beings. How long did it take to fail? Some say a few months. If there's anything the 20th century history shows it is the great difficulty humans have in coming up with a viable decision making structure that can substitute for the "invisible hand" of the market.

The fad for deregulation is obviously over for the time being, but the drive to regulate is not going to bring up much debate about what should be substituted for the entire capitalist system, or so say I.

I think there is some truth to the way Keynes put it as to why we should support the existence of a system that seems so insane.

"The love of money as a possession — as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life — will be recognised for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease ... But beware! The time for all this is not yet. For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to everyone that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. For only they can lead us out of the tunnel of economic necessity into daylight."

Unfortunately it has turned out that the planet isn't big enough for all of us to ever be "rich".

Yet now that Keynes' name has come to the fore again, all I hear from the third class passengers on the Titanic as described in the Tyee article, "The Meltdown, Seen from Below" is gimme gimme more more more. Vancouver is listed by the UN as the best city in the world to live in: but obviously we don't have enough. Have any of these people read Keynes? Would they agree as to the underlying insanity of the system as he sees it?

So we ran out of planet before we found the means to get away from this system which holds up as vital virtues the "semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease".

Such is the power of this dream of getting rich we haven't even realized we've run out of planet yet even as our best scientists shout that it is so from the rooftops.

to DL

1. Yes, TILMA is being sold as an agreement that allows "free trade" and labor exchange between provinces (something provinces more or less already have, by the way).
But it's specious, because it's NOT what TILMA is really about - it's about corporate power having precedence over small local industry, local communities, and small town/city political governance and regulations.

2. You also wrote that, "A recent survey conducted by the World Economic Forum found that it was the opinion of those surveyed that Canada's banking system is the strongest in the world." This is more MSM bullmanure - Did you know that "those surveyed" were CEOs of Canada's leading corporations? PURE OPINION! This was NOT a formal, properly conducted survey but one skewed in favor of those cherry-picked to be polled.

De-regulator--Or law breaker !

Campbell gets caught again,judge gives him 6 months to rectify the problem

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=c54a28e2-9157-4072-9eeb-1fec369cbb8a

What Where They Thinking

Quality of life at risk: Canada places 15th among 17 in report for its environmental problems. Its are gas emissions, high garbage production, and overuse of fresh water are listed as our biggest environmental problems. No mention of all the carbon we will now be producing to keep our 300 million American neighbors in their quest for energy as we now become a major supplier to USA. Now thats gotta hurt big time, the environment that is.
The Think-Tank, the Conference Board of Canada then goes on to talk about business and how the Recession is narrowly avoided as it speaks of how Canada will barely skirt recession with slumping trade to USA. I agree but Its our natural resources sold off to the American now thats whats gonna make the difference when its comes to GDP but no mention of that.

alda...

You say that - ""those surveyed" were CEOs of Canada's leading corporations? "

According the the Survey:

"The World Economic Forum has conducted the
annual Survey for nearly 30 years.This year, the Survey was completed by 12,297 top management business leaders—an all-time high—in 134 countries.

The Forum collaborates closely with a network of over 140 Partner Institutes that administer the Executive Opinion Survey at the national level.1 Typically, the Partner Institutes are recognized economics departments of national universities, independent research institutes, or business organizations.

in order to reach a representative sample of Survey responses from each economy, the Partner Institutes are each year required to follow a detailed set of guidelines.The process was reinforced this year with the support of an internationally renowned survey consultancy and in collaboration between the World Economic Forum and the Institute of Strategy and Competitiveness at the Harvard Business School. In this way, the process is moving toward a best practice procedure, ensuring greater data accuracy and allowing for more robust comparison across economies."

How would you make this more accurate?

By actually doing some real reseach

That statement was nothing but pure fluff - just like Colin Hansen's statement about 6 weeks ago describing how lovely everything was in the ministry of finance....

The executives surveyed are exactly the same types of purblind liars who created the derivatives and hedge funds and the other crooked deals that have bankrupted the American (and much of the world's too) economy.

Canada will be no exception.

George Bush is a graduate of Harvard Business School.

I think suggesting any business or financial authority is credible is a good way or proving exactly how pointless it is to believe anything they say....these are the people who sold this global market bullshit in the first place, and they’re the ones who suggested that making themselves richer than Midas was going to be the solution of the world's problems.

Ignore 'em, put them before a court of working people and give them a fair trial - those convicted can join Conrad Black and provide library services to their fellow inmates.

GWest

So you'd put the, "economics departments of national universities" on trial too? Interesting.

Absolutely and have been doing

Perhaps you'd care to start with a short interview from last Sunday's New York Times Magazine with James Galbraith...

I'll just provide one question and answer for you, you're a clever fellow, find the rest for yourself if you're interested.
Question (Deborah Solomon)

What does that say about the field of economics, which claims to be a science?

It’s an enormous blot on the reputation of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.

Is that sufficiently critical for you realisticman; and sufficiently thoroughgoing relative to economics in the academy?

I certainly HOPE so.

GWest

If you agree with alda that the supposition that Canada's banking system is the strongest in the world is just so much "more MSM bullmanure", then which country's system do you like?

Right now

I don't believe there is a strong banking 'system' anywhere in the world. Perhaps Mohammed Unis’s Grameen Bank might qualify. It is in the business of doing what a bank ought to do – providing a way for real people to help other real people

Every other single one of them has been compromised to a greater or lesser extent by years of neoliberal lies and globalization crap. They spin fiat money and play with it as if it were Monopoly cash and their decisions had no more impact on real people and their lives than the outcome of a child's game has.

Unfortunately, the only reality is that ordinary working people are going to have to dig themselves and the system out of the mess your avatars have made of things since the 70s.

While you were crowing about how this garbage had raised people from poverty, I was demonstrating that the global economy wasn't producing enough food for the world when things were (by your lights) going well.

For months people here have been trying to wake you and your clique up. What finally made the difference?

Just watch the starvation, illness and growing un-development spin out now my friend - and pat yourself on the back for being so ‘prescient’ - how many 'citizens' are starving in Pakistan today?

GWest

Did you see him on Charlie Rose a few days ago, with Michael Milken! Wonderful man.

http://www.charlierose.com/shows/2008/10/27/1/a-conversation-with-michael-milken-muhammad-yunus

For many months I've been advising anyone interested that these are not the times to be in debt.

Yep! I definitely prefer him to Matthew Barrett.

You should have been talking to the US government and all the banks and investment houses.

But no, I actually don't remember you making any such points about debt at all - perhaps it didn't quite fit the 'image' you've been affecting ever since I noticed your 'presence' here at Tyee.

You also posted, as I recall, something about your friends seeing you as being quite 'liberal' - I didn't have much problem disbelieving that either. I do remember your virtual excitement when I described a particular offshore investment vehicle that, at the time, was delivering quite remarkable returns on investments of 10G or more to some individuals of my acquaintance.

*Bonk!*

Whoopsie-daisy ... *boink!* ... pardon me ... *bump* ... oops, sorry ... *klunk* ...

How long will BCers continue to support the stumbling-bumbling fool?