Genius. Weeks ago there were rolling brownouts, and we were ordered to turn off our electricity.
— Joel Engel (@joelengel) September 23, 2020
Given that Newsom has no plans to build zero-emission nuke plants, where's all the juice going to come from?
California: the state of magical thinking.https://t.co/Jl04TYVhC2
That's on top of one of the biggest disadvantages of electric cars: the time it takes to charge them.
Foundation for Economic Education:
Dozens of people were killed or injured in the violent unrest, and thousands of businesses and properties, many minority-owned, were looted, torched, or otherwise vandalized. Only now are we beginning to realize the full cost of the destruction. New reporting from Axios reveals that the total insured property losses incurred during the George Floyd riots will come in at $1 billion to $2 billion.
That's only the insured losses.
[...] insurance is no panacea for the societal ills imposed by rioting. Indeed, 75 percent of US businesses are under-insured and about 40 percent of small businesses have no insurance at all. Their untold millions in losses don’t show up in the $2 billion figure. [...]
One study of the 1992 Los Angeles riots concluded that not only did the destruction cause $1 billion in initial property damage, over time it led to an economic decline of $3.8 billion in sales activity and at least $125 million in tax revenue.
The worst loss for the Left: the re-election of the God-Emperor.
The modern Left. pic.twitter.com/5SItviIbxg
— RAMZPAUL (@ramzpaul) September 15, 2020
Also, their economic policies have been devastating. The Left loves open borders while condemning horribly low wages for the average worker. Yet, they still get significant amount of the votes in the West. Goes to show that mass media propaganda works and, of course, MPAI.
Rory Sutherland is quite astute:
There are two ways to become richer. One is to earn more. The other is to spend less on things you are forced to buy. Given the extraordinary centralising forces of the past 40 years — where the gains of the knowledge economy have disproportionately accrued to rent-seeking city landlords and transport networks — the freedom to work remotely is an instant 20 per cent pay rise. And sorry Boris, but if I travel to work in order to buy a £6 sandwich, in the short term, yes, I am bailing out Pret A Manger, but in the long term I’m bailing out the Duke of Westminster.
The cost of driving a car is staggering for the average person in Canada.
The total cost of ownership for a car is $955 per month when you include all your car payments, gas, maintenance, and auto insurance costs. After 3 years, you’ve paid for your car in full, and your payments drop to $502 per month.
That's $6,000 a year if you buy and use a prudent car for a long time. A cost that's not mentioned? The hundreds of hours burned in miserable traffic. I knew a colleague who often took over one hour to get home after work. During a horrendous snow storm it took him close to four hours. Living close to work (if it's not crazy expensive) or working from home (if possible) is definitely a huge income boost.
Of course, the landlords and, by extension, the banks won't be very happy about that.
The trillions of dollars transferred over to blacks in the past five decades wasn't enough:
Supporters of reparations assume the racial wealth gap between blacks and whites is the result of slavery, and thus, something to be fixed through reparations. “If the 40-acres-and-a-mule that was promised to free slaves were delivered to the descendants of those slaves today, we would all be billionaires,” state Sen. Steven Bradford (D-Gardena) said. “I hear far too many people say, ‘Well, I didn’t own slaves, that was so long ago.’ Well, you inherit wealth — you can inherit the debt that you owe to African-Americans.”
That's the evil of equality. It can never be achieved. The demands are, therefore, never-ending.
My parents and my brother and I came to the country in 1975. We didn't inherit any wealth in the U.S. (and really none anywhere). I don't owe any debt—because of my skin color my ancestors or theirs—to blacks or whites or Asians, and neither do other Californians.
Utterly irrelevant. What matters is that you've got $$$$ and the retarded losers don't. The power-hungry leftist politicians will have no qualms about extorting money from Asians, Indians, Jews, and even rich blacks in America to appease their precious black vote. In effect, it'll be another wealth transfer from the rich to the poor. The slavery rhetoric is there to call the opponents horrible, evil, racist Nazis who hate poor black people.
Math is very hard!
Just saw this video of someone else posting their experience pic.twitter.com/cVlnoU1HVA
— sheldon (@sheldonstevig) August 28, 2020
The diabolical and predatory universities have increased the costs of higher "education" while the real wages for most jobs are stagnant. Also, the government doesn't trust these teenage idiots with a can of beer but it's perfectly acceptable for them to offer tens of thousands of dollars in loans with shockingly high interest rates that eventually crush the wealth building capacity and sanity of young people.
Life in NYC:
The result? The rich people start leaving and the city deteriorates even more.
NYC’s top 1% pays 50% of all income taxes. Personal income tax in the NY area accounts for 59% of all revenues.
— Hannah Cox (@HannahCox7) August 19, 2020
The city’s very wealthiest blocks have decreased by 40% +.
Atlas shrugged, as we always predicted it would.
Y’all are gonna learn one day. https://t.co/OqR3cNCzzx
Oh, they never learn. They'll just blame the eeevil rich for not paying their fair share.
Dan Mitchell: The Economic Damage of Wealth Taxation.
Consider a large farm worth $50 million in the US. The owner of that farm makes roughly $500,000 annually in profit. Now, the government decides to levy a "modest" wealth tax of 2%. The owner of that farm would have to pay $1 million a year, every year, for that farm. That one "small" tax is double his annual income. If he doesn't have substantial savings, then he'll have to sell the farm. Of course, then the new owner will have to worry about the tax. Most likely, the property value will drop and a few workers will be fired to make the whole enterprise more efficient.
Smart rich people will see this atrocity coming from a mile away. They'll quietly move a significant amount of their money to outside of the US before the wealth tax hits. In other words, the negative consequences of the wealth tax will be seen before it even goes into effect.
I think he is talking about taxing unrealized gains. AOC talked about it a month ago. It's insanity.
— Noelle Whaley (@Fan_of_Freddie) August 6, 2020
That's essentially a wealth tax. That would be extremely destructive. Furthermore, I wouldn't be surprised to see this proposed for real estate. Imagine a guy whose house doubles in value from $500,000 to $1 million. The clowns in government will be "asking" him to pay a 50% tax on those "gains".
Eating “healthier” is really a privilege honestly
— Ghetto Barbie (@choKolatOnTop) August 1, 2020
Deal prices in Ontario, Canada:
Add in salt, pepper, chili flakes, garlic power, paprika, and oregano, and you've got the essentials for healthy and inexpensive meals.
Eating healthier isn't a privilege. It's simply inconvenient. Waiting in line for under a minute to get a calorie-packed meal combo is just easy. The average adult watches five hours of TV in a day in America. "I got no time," isn't a legit excuse.
The change in his expression is both sad and funny:
Comedy Break: Ecstatic teen opens his first-ever paycheck, learns what taxes are, is absolutely crushed https://t.co/cRCarYIym9 pic.twitter.com/Zj1siRhENq
— Disrn (@DisrnNews) July 26, 2020
It's under 8%. If he's making a decent living a few years later, then he'll be paying close to half of his income to the various levels of government (state and federal income taxes, sales taxes, property tax, etc.). That's really going to hurt.
Matt Patsky confronts corporations on everything from their carbon footprints to the diversity of their workforces. But now, in the wake of racial unrest sweeping America, Patsky is having a reckoning of his own.
“I get a ‘D’ on diversity,” says Patsky, whose $3 billion Trillium Asset Management pressed investors to divest from South Africa during its anti-apartheid struggles. Just 10% of his 44 employees come from minority backgrounds -- a number that he said warrants a “C” relative to the broader financial industry. “We have to start walking the talk and make the same changes we’re asking companies to make.”
I wonder if this "representation" bullshit applies to all businesses. For instance, a company has a few dozen employees and all of them are non-White; do they have to fire 60% of their workforce to hire White workers to be in compliance with the non-racist current year? Of course, we know the answer.
“We have made considerable progress on gender equality, but I think that has to some extent been at the detriment of the same level of razor focus on issues to do with ethnicity and class,” Baig says.
Considerable progress on gender equality? Can you guess the percentage of women in the following professions in the USA?
Answer: 2-4%. SJWs want quotas for vaginas in boardrooms but they curiously neglect those professions mentioned above.
Amir Pars asks a very interesting question:
Disparities are only proof of disparities. Just because Group X doesn't have the same as Group Y, doesn't mean that it's explained by racism. And why does this so called "White Supremacy" only run against one group of Black Americans? Why doesn't it run against Asian Americans, who out earn White Americans by over 60%? Why doesn't it apply to Jewish Americans? Or Indian Americans, all of whom earn more than... White Americans??
The concepts of "White Privilege" and "White Supremacy" are quite strange when the average Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Singaporean, Malaysian, Indian, Pakistani, and the Lebanese household out earns the average White household in America.
As health restrictions ease and stores, restaurants, and other services start to reopen, some employers complain they cannot entice workers back to their old jobs. Perhaps their employees changed careers or enrolled in higher education; others may be reluctant to come back while community spread of COVID-19 is still widespread.
It’s another headache for business owners trying to restart after the shutdowns. The President of the Canadian Federation of Independent Business went so far as to declare that Canadian employers now face a “shortage of labour.”
Technically, he's correct. If I was an employer and I offered jobs that paid $10 per hour, then there would definitely be a shortage of labour.
The correct solution to this "shortage"? Increase the wage. The solution that the employers want? Import peasants who'll work for low wages and not complain. Of course, if you oppose this, then you're a HORRIBLE RACIST WHO SHOULD BE IMMEDIATELY AND PERMANENTLY CANCELED.
In theory, if something is in short supply, its price should increase. But the laws of supply and demand are suspended whenever employers complain it’s too hard to fill job openings — and then inevitably demand that government do something about it.
Yup. It's a neat trick. Keep wages low ... get almost zero local workers ... cry, whine, gnash teeth ... get cheap foreign workers!
While low wages are a big part of the problem, meager and irregular hours make matters much worse.
Employers’ recruitment problems are partly due to stingy wages. But their failure to offer decent, reliable hours is actually the bigger issue. Most retail and hospitality workers are scheduled for inadequate and irregular hours. As a result, weekly incomes are very low: a median of just $450 a week in the hospitality sector. Who wants to return to work and risk infection, for a handful of hours’ work at minimum wage?
I know that at my local grocery store, the workers are scheduled in an utterly unstable manner. It's not unusual to have the following work week for an average employee:
MON: 11 AM - 6:30 PM
TUE: 6:45 AM - 3:30 PM
WED: 3:30 PM - 8:30 PM
THU: OFF
FRI: 7:30 AM - 12:30 PM
SAT and SUN: OFF
Then, the next week brings a completely different schedule. And yeah, that's a minimum wage job. 25 hours a week, on average. Take home monthly pay? $1,300. What's really insidious is that a motivated employee can't really fit another regular, part-time job in the mix because the hours are unpredictable.
C O N S U M E
— Count Dankula🏴 (@CountDankulaTV) June 2, 2020
P R O D U C T pic.twitter.com/Mk0Tz74ke6
Of all people, a real estate agent is crying about the greed of banksters:
When the pandemic hit Ontario, Kristina Barybina's income as a real estate agent dried up and she knew the writing was on the wall — she'd have to sell her own house.
She also knew there'd be a penalty for getting out of her five-year mortgage with TD Bank early — she just wasn't expecting it to be almost $30,000. "I thought my eyes were going to pop out," said Barybina. "It's insane."
Later in the article:
She was only 19 months into a five-year mortgage, with a fixed-rate of 3.71 per cent, and still owed $591,000. TD used a controversial calculation to arrive at the penalty for breaking the terms. She owed another $29,530.
$29,530 out of $591,000. That's a 5% penalty for getting out of the mortgage. It's steep but not unreasonable. It looks insane because the dollar amount is huge.
What should be more concerning is that this woman accepted over half a million dollars of debt less than two years ago while having zero emergency savings. She was on shaky ground even before the virus hit as she tried to sell the house six months ago. This means that her normal income streams weren't sufficient to cover all the bills.
She also shot herself in the foot by going public with this story. I certainly wouldn't want to hire this whiny fool as my agent.
People with physically demanding jobs take more sick leave. They also have higher unemployment rates and shorter work lives, a new Danish study finds.
"This study showed that high physical work demands are a marked risk factor for a shortened expected working life and increased years of sickness absence and unemployment," study co-author Lars Andersen and colleagues wrote. Andersen is with the National Research Center for the Working Environment in Copenhagen.
The difference was much smaller than what I expected.
For men age 30, working life would be expected to last almost 32 years for those with physically demanding jobs and nearly 34 years for those with physically undemanding jobs. Among women, the figures were just over 29.5 years and nearly 33 years, respectively, according to the researchers.
Old high school teachers and professors almost always have the option to teach a course or two in a given semester. Retired laborers, however, would seriously injure themselves in their old jobs. I knew a mathematics teacher whose husband was a car mechanic. They didn't need the money but he just loved his work. Eventually he had to give in as the body couldn't take the toll. A few years later, she retired as well. Funny, how that anecdote fits the data.
Scandinavia’s biggest economy will shrink 7 per cent this year, Finance Minister Magdalena Andersson said on Tuesday. And while overall deaths are on the decline, Sweden’s had 6.25 deaths per million inhabitants per day in a rolling average between May 12 and May 19, according to Ourworldinsata.org. That was the highest in Europe on a per capita basis and just above the United Kingdom, which had 5.75 deaths per million.
Over the course of the pandemic Sweden, which reported a total 3,831 deaths as of May 20, still had fewer deaths per capita than the U.K., Spain, Italy, Belgium and France, which have all opted for lockdowns, but the Swedes have a much higher death toll than their Nordic neighbours Denmark, Norway and Finland.
The big unknown is the long term impact for those who got sick and recovered. Just how much damage did they suffer? Did the virus significantly reduce their lifespans? We simply don't know the answers at the moment. In a perverse way, Sweden has provided the world a grand experiment. Scientists can follow, record, and compare the myriad costs of Lockdowns vs. No Lockdown.
Message received
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 11, 2020
— Orwell & Goode (@OrwellNGoode) May 8, 2020
MIT has been uploading in-class lectures from certain professors for over two decades. A student can miss his 8:30 a.m. class and still get the exact same info at noon upon waking up. However, most universities don't offer this option. This old high school and university system is incredibly inefficient*. Worse, as the Dark Lord puts it:
Conventional classroom education is expensive, unhealthy, and unethical.
Of course, the purpose of the system isn't education but Leftist indoctrination. Also, as one commenter correctly states: K-12 is basically daycare for parents.
* Think about how much money universities could save by a) hiring only one superstar lecturer per course, and b) not having to pay weekly rent and utility costs for giant halls. From a purely economics point of view, online education would be a HUGE money-saver for these institutions. So, it's not about the money ...
A million Canadians have lost their jobs in a just a few weeks. An excellent way to help them is to import tens of thousands of foreign workers:
Employers bringing thousands of agricultural labourers into Canada in the coming weeks will be required to quarantine them before they can work, and the federal government is promising to offset some of the costs.
Agriculture Minister Marie-Claude Bibeau announced $50 million in federal funding Monday to provide $1,500 per worker, which can be used to cover wages while they are in quarantine or the costs of space to isolate for the 14 days required under a law meant to stop the spread of COVID-19.
What a perverse situation: unemployed Canadians are going to pay higher taxes to subsidize workers from other countries. On the bright side, they won't be called racists.
China has been absolutely brutal towards its own Muslim population. One would be an idiot to think that the Chinese dictatorship would be nice to foreign Muslims:
In a rather hilarious and an uncanny incident, China, the now 'fair-weathered' friend of Pakistan, had promised 'top quality' medical aid to Pakistan for fighting the deadly coronavirus infection has ended up sending N95 masks made out of underwear. China actually duped Pakistan as its 'top quality' aid failed to be of any help for Pakistan.
Reporting the news, the anchor of the Pakistani news channel said, "China ne chuna laga diya," which in English means China actually conned us (Pakistan).
Now, that's poetry.
The staggering cost of coronavirus:
A staggering 16.8 million Americans lost their jobs in just three weeks in a measure of how fast the coronavirus has brought world economies to their knees. Meanwhile, religious leaders around the globe Thursday urged people to celebrate Good Friday and Easter from the safety of their homes.
Just two months ago, it was so puzzling to see all-time highs for the US stock markets. I thought: if the pandemic is serious, then surely people will be taking their money out? Where is the collapse? And then, we got the most epic selling in over three decades.
Now, in just one month, the job market is utterly dead. The unemployment rate is racing towards the worst in almost a century. The really bad news will be when mortgages go unpaid and banks start failing. That's the global nightmare triple failure: stock markets, housing markets, and banks. For the average person that's the massacre of their equity investments, real estate, and savings.
BREAKING: City of Toronto is recalling $200,000 worth of bad masks (don't stop spread of droplets) 62,600 were distributed to long term care homes March 28, now the city is trying to figure out how many employees were using the faulty masks and if possibly exposed to #covid19
— Cynthia Mulligan (@CityCynthia) April 7, 2020
Made in China, of course.
The "experts" were telling the public not to bother with masks a few weeks ago.
Idiots! Scientism kills pple's innate reasoning abilities & survival instinct
— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) April 7, 2020
You don't wear a mask jus because you have evidence that transmission is airborne. You wear a mask because YOU DON'T KNOW whether transmission is airborne.#Asymmetry.https://t.co/A8VyyVFW2A
They were also discouraging people from stocking up on food, toilet paper, disinfectants, etc. If you stocked up, then the worse that will happen is that you'll have rice, flour, pasta, and so on for many many months. If you didn't stock up, then the worse is that the Coronavirus shatters the supply chains and YOU DON'T HAVE FOOD FOR YOUR FAMILY.
Stocking up is the rational option. Yet, idiots on the Internet point and laugh at those who took the logical steps.
Faced with a White House-ordered ban on exports of key COVID-19 medical supplies to Canada and abroad, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is trying a more diplomatic approach with U.S. President Donald Trump, hoping to convince him such a ban will harm Americans and Canadians alike. [...]
He highlighted that thousands of medical workers who live in Canada work every day in the United States, helping to treat novel coronavirus patients in America. He also noted Canada supplies the U.S. with many key COVID-19 supplies including pulp for surgical-grade N95 masks, test kits and gloves.
That's likely a good argument for the US to eventually make its own pulp to secure the supply chain and completely cut out Canada. Trudeau is correct, though. That will harm Americans: the masks will be more expensive. Canadians will be harmed as well: no surgical-grade masks from the US.
Knowing Trump, he'll make some deal.
Epic chart: US weekly jobless claims data series since inception. pic.twitter.com/G5k24nxJRS
— sᴛᴀʀᴛᴜᴘ ᴅᴀᴇᴍᴏɴ 🇺🇸 (@startupdaemon) April 2, 2020
The coronavirus outbreak has thrown 10 million Americans out of work in just two weeks, the swiftest, most stunning collapse the U.S. job market has ever witnessed, and economists warn unemployment could reach levels not seen since the Depression, as the economic damage piles up around the world.
The bleak news Thursday — a record-shattering 6.6 million new unemployment claims on top of last week's unprecedented 3.3 million — came as the competition for scarce ventilators, masks and other protective gear seemed to grow more desperate and deaths mounted with alarming speed in Italy, Spain and New York, the most lethal hot spot in the nation, with nearly 2,400 lives lost.
The highest unemployment rate in US history was during the Great Depression: 25%. If it does hit that level again, then the total number of unemployed will be 41 million. The middle class will have to sell their equities. The stock market crash will continue. Others will have to sell their homes. The housing crash will begin. Many won't be able to pay their mortgages. Banks will start to fail. So, those who had put away a few bucks will see their savings evaporate. Guns, ammo, and toilet paper will be the new currencies.
The vaccine can't be made soon enough.
An absolutely devastating possibility for the United States:
As the coronavirus, or COVID-19, wreaks havoc on the U.S. economy, more than 66 million jobs across sales, production, and food preparation services are at “high risk” of layoffs, according to a St. Louis Federal Reserve economist.
Using 2018 occupational data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) detailing 808 occupations, the St. Louis Fed’s Charles Gascon found that 66.8 million people — 46% of working Americans — are employed in these occupations that are at “high risk” of layoffs.
Canada’s economy will clock its steepest decline on record in the coming months, and unemployment is set to rise to its highest level in nearly a quarter century, a new CIBC forecast says. [...]
The forecast predicts Canada’s economic output will shrink at a 15-to-20-per-cent annual pace in the second quarter, the fastest contraction in records going back to 1962.
Millions will feel serious pain because of the culture of debt. 180%. That's the average Canadian household debt relative to disposable income. Now, in just one week, half a million Canadians have lost their jobs. Worse, this will have a compounding effect: most will severely curtail their spending for months, if not years. Many industries -- airlines, hotels, restaurants, tourist attractions, theaters, etc. -- won't be hiring new workers for a long time. Those who are graduating from universities with mountains of debt will have to suffer through rotten times.
Other countries will also take a serious hit.
Economists at investment bank Goldman Sachs see the U.S. economy shrinking at an incredible 24-per-cent pace in the second quarter.
The last time the global economies crashed in such a sharp manner was 90 years ago. This terrible virus is a painful reminder to avoid debt and always have emergency savings. People wrongly think that their incomes will be stable. Business failure, recession, war, natural disaster or a pandemic can completely devastate multiple professions.
"Ah, those things are rare!"
Yeah, something rare always happens!
What I wrote on March 18, 2020:
Or in other words: If COVID-19 infects 60 million people in America, then more will die from it than the total number of Americans who were killed in all the US wars combined. This virus has the potential to be more lethal for America than all her wars over 250 years.
The USA has 32,000 ICU beds, which puts it right in between at one ICU bed for every 10,000 people. This means that if the mitigation calculations are correct, the medical resources would be overwhelmed by a factor of 8x, thereby leading to fatalities in excess of 2 million.
Yup. My basic arithmetic put the total US fatalities at 2.4 million; assuming that a) COVID-19 infects roughly 60 million people in America, and b) the mortality rate holds at 4%. The fact that people smarter than me are getting similar fatality numbers is extremely alarming.
World Total:
— Yaneer Bar-Yam (@yaneerbaryam) March 21, 2020
March 6: 100,000
March 17: 200,000, 11 days
March 21: 300,000, 4 d
Deaths:
Feb 18: 2,000 deaths
March 9: 4,000 deaths, 20 d
March 14: 6,000 deaths, 5 d
March 17: 8,000 deaths, 3 d
March 19: 10,000 deaths, 2 d
March 6: Bhutan 1 case, closed border. Today 2nd case. pic.twitter.com/CwrCyp0i79
It takes 2-4 weeks to get this virus under control after a total lockdown. If the entire world did that today, then we would start to see hopeful results on April 7! Of course, countries that were careful are already seeing the value of vigilance.
Canada got serious about one week ago. There were 342 confirmed cases then. Today, there are over 1,300. A few more weeks of pain to follow. We should see a flattening of the curve here in early April.
Sadiq Khan has said there is ‘no risk’ of people catching coronavirus while travelling on buses or trains in the capital.
The Mayor of London has urged people to continue to use the Tube and go to concerts despite the outbreak of the disease. So far in the UK, 39 people have tested positive to the virus.
March 20, 2020: The politicians are definitely assholes but these idiots only have themselves to blame. After the chaos, and high economic and financial costs around the globe, they're still close enough to cough on each other!? Yeah, keep tempting fate.
This was my commute to work in London this morning @BorisJohnson. This is what you get on London underground when you reduce the service but people still have to go to work. There was a lot of coughing too.
— Lord Riley (@DRileyamusing) March 20, 2020
How do we stay safe in this environment?#CoronaVirusUpdate pic.twitter.com/wT345MEjND
In an analysis published Tuesday, Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis suggests that the response to the coronavirus pandemic may be “a fiasco in the making” because we are making seismic decisions based on “utterly unreliable” data https://t.co/vbvrqJDB92
— Mike 'Thomas Paine' Moore (@Thomas1774Paine) March 19, 2020
The virus started in China. There is no question that the political elite there are not telling the truth. The data is simply incomplete. However, once fragmented global statistics are compiled, the mortality rate turns out to be roughly 4%. Of course, the rate for young people is super-low while incredibly high for the elderly. Also, it's likely that hundreds of thousands of the infected have not been test and are not counted. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the true mortality rate is 1% or lower.
Given all this uncertainty, the main point of N. N. Taleb is utterly sensible: we need to be extra-vigilant against this global threat. Short-term pain is preferable over the possibility of long-term disaster.
Trump closed America's borders to China in early February. Canada waited till mid-March to do the same. Now, entire provinces are locked down. Schools, colleges, universities, bars, restaurants, theaters, cinemas, botanical gardens, and museums are all closed. Those 45 days of smug virtue-signalling by Canada will now cost hundreds of billions of dollars in lost jobs and productivity. The Canadian stock market wiped out eight years of gains in under a month. The Canadian dollar crashed 10% against the US dollar in the same time. The Great Housing Bubble of the last decade is now ready to burst. The only rising stats will be for prices, bankruptcies and suicides.
The largest province of Canada has declared a state of emergency:
Premier Doug Ford has declared a provincial state of emergency in response to a worsening COVID-19 outbreak and will now order the closure of restaurants and bars not providing takeout service along with a host of other venues where crowds are known to gather. [...]
He says that under the order the government will prohibit all organized public events of more than 50 people until March 31, including services in places of worship. He said that the order will also force the closure of all facilities providing indoor recreational programs, all public libraries and private schools, all licenced childcare centres, all bars and restaurants that don’t provide takeout services and all theatres, cinemas and concert venues.
Canadians will have an extra month to file their taxes this year:
Canadians will have one extra month to file their taxes to the Canada Revenue Agency, the National Post has learned.
The announcement will be made tomorrow by federal ministers as part of a larger series of financial measures to assist Canadian individuals and governments through the COVID-19 pandemic.
So instead of an April 30 filing deadline for the 2020 tax season, Canadians will have until June 1 to submit their income tax return to CRA.
Many people will have to borrow money to pay their taxes. If this corona shutdown drags on for weeks, then people will have trouble making their mortgage payments. Eventually, quite a few will have to sell their houses to get cash. The magnitude of the housing market crash in the next year will illuminate the carnage.
Mara Gay: 500 million divided by 330 million is like 1 million
— Lauren Chen (@TheLaurenChen) March 13, 2020
Almost everyone: wut no
Mara Gay again: Why do you hate black people https://t.co/vQgN4CQcKi
This entire time I thought that she couldn't do basic arithmetic because she's a woman. Now, I learn it's because she's a negro. The oppression!
The wife of the Canadian prime minister tested positive for the Wuhan virus last night.
The prime minister will have to quarantine himself for two weeks. He's also considering steps to close the borders to limit the virus.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the federal government will warn Canadians against international travel and is considering tightening the border to some international travellers.
Public schools will be closed for the next three weeks in Ontario. Canadian universities are starting to cancel their classes.
A famous Chinese city is getting the maximum benefits of socialist health care:
Vancouver has learned that a shortage of personal protective equipment for physicians and support staff has Vancouver doctors turning patients away from their offices as the provincial health-care system begins to show the strain of potential COVID-19 infections.
Doctors of BC, an association of doctors and medical residents, says physicians across the province are concerned about the shortage of supplies like face masks, with no timeline for new supplies despite a government injection of hundreds of millions of dollars.
No matter how this plays out, it certainly won't be boring.
By Thursday’s close, the S&P 500 dropped 9.5%, or 260.62 points, in its largest percentage decline since the Black Monday crash of October 19, 1987. The blue-chip index slid more than 20% in total from its recent closing high from mid-February, sending it into a bear market.
The Dow’s 9.99% decline Thursday was also the biggest since 1987, and constituted a drop of 2,352.6 points.
So, today was the worst day for the US financial markets in 33 years.
And, if you thought that was bad, take a look at Canada:
The S&P/TSX Composite Index fell 12 per cent Thursday, the biggest one day drop since May 1940, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Trading was halted earlier in the day amid dramatic selling at the opening. The nation’s benchmark slumped to its lowest since February 2016 at the close.
The last time the Canadian stock market crashed so spectacularly, Hitler's armies were marching through and conquering the Western part of Europe.
I've been paying attention to the financial markets for the last eight years. Never have I seen such volatility and pessimism. The NYSE has halted a few minutes into the open because of a steep 7% drop.
U.S. stocks hit critical circuit breaker levels on Thursday minutes after the opening bell for the second time this week as global markets plunged amid investor fears about the coronavirus global pandemic.
SPY has gone from a high of $339 to $250 in under a month. That's a staggering 26% drop. TVIX has gone from $40 to $420 in about three weeks.
The New York Stock Exchange halted trading for 15 minutes after the S&P 500 tanked by 7% in a few minutes. That's the first time I've seen it happen in real time.
TVIX was around $40 last month. Today, it hit $302. Absolutely insane.
Ladies, what's sexier? 🌸
— Juliana Stewart (@JulianaStewart_) February 28, 2020
A 50/50 relationship is when you split the bills, date nights, holidays, living arrangements, everything.
A man who provides means you can work if you want to but don't have to, he knows how to hold it down.
The ratio of women to men is approaching 2:1 in colleges. Plus, too many women support ridiculous vagina quotas for high-paying jobs. Not to mention, the downward pressure on wages thanks to near-open borders. So, how exactly are men supposed to get a job that would provide for their households?
Aurora wanted to be #1 but now, there's a strong possibility that they'll go bankrupt:
Aurora Cannabis Inc. reported a second-quarter loss Thursday that missed analyst expectations due to a sharp decline in cannabis production, while writing down about $1 billion in assets as the pot giant looks to dramatically reduce spending to become profitable.
The management at Aurora used shares worth $3.2 billion to buy two companies (CanniMed and MedReleaf) in a six-month period in 2018. Not to mention the dozens of other companies they bought over the years. Today, the market valuation of Aurora is $2.13 billion. Its stock price is down 88% from all-time highs. They're losing money and running out of cash fast.
They were foolish to tout an annual grow rate of 600,000 kg of cannabis two years ago. Today, they are harvesting only 30,000 kg a quarter while selling about a third of that.
The quarterly results, presupposed by last week's corporate overhaul, mark a pivotal period for the cannabis company, which is the second-largest pot producer in the world by valuation behind rival Canopy Growth Corp.
I had a feeling that was wrong. So, I checked the market caps on Google Finance:
Aurora was the second-largest. Now, it's at the third position.
"Tesla shorts were down $2.89 billion in ... losses in 2019 and are down $8.31 billion in ... losses so far in 2020, including $2.47 billion on today's price move," S3 Partners analyst Ihor Dusaniwsky said in a research note.
Tesla stock price at the beginning of this year was $430. It's now at $945. Those who bought calls made an absolute killing. Those who bought puts are crying.
The rich vs. poor rhetoric is alive and well. All for the impossible quest of equality. One can't make the poor into life-long millionaires. The only way to achieve "equality" is to destroy the rich. Equal misery for everyone! Of course, the people who make these decisions enjoy their power and luxuries.
"No one ever makes a billion dollars. You take a billion dollars," Ocasio-Cortez said, receiving applause. "I'm not here to villainize and to say billionaires are inherently morally corrupt. ... It's to say that this system that we live in, life in capitalism always ends in billionaires."
Ocasio-Cortez said billionaires make their money "off the backs" of "undocumented people," "black and brown people being paid under a living wage" and "single mothers."
She addressed a hypothetical "widget" billionaire in her remarks.
"You didn't make those widgets, did you? Because you employed thousands of people and paid them less than a living wage to make those widgets for you," Ocasio-Cortez said. "You didn't make those widgets. You sat on a couch while thousands of people were paid modern-day slave wages, and in some cases real modern-day slavery."
It's always amusing when Leftists bash the rich and wealthy. Here, Cortez accuses billionaires of paying "slave wages" and slavery. Yet, she can't name one person.
Bill Gates? Michael Dell? Michael Bloomberg? Elon Musk? Steven Spielberg? Who are these evil, corrupt billionaires? Should they not be in jail for their heinous crimes? Why doesn't the righteous and morally pure Cortez use her political power to identify the barbarous billionaires and then put them behind bars?
The top 10% of Canada’s earners make 34% of the country’s income, but are paying 54% of income taxes, says a new essay that questions the premise that the “rich” don’t pay enough tax.
“Despite common misperceptions and misleading rhetoric, our top 10 per cent of income-earners pay more than half of Canada’s income taxes — and this group includes people that few would consider wealthy,” said Philip Cross, a former chief economic analyst at Statistics Canada, in the essay released by the Fraser Institute.
[...] And here’s the kicker. Being in the top 10% of earners in Canada doesn’t mean you are wealthy. In fact, in 2017, any Canadian making $96,000 (or more) was in that group, Cross says.
Most of these evil rich people are your teachers, professors, doctors, and engineers -- and too many are hit by the top marginal income tax rate of 50%+! Yet, a large portion of Canadians think that the rich need to pay more.
Here's another shocking statistic:
The average Canadian household paid nearly $40,000 in taxes last year, more than the combined cost of clothing, food and shelter, according to a new report. The Fraser Institute’s annual Canadian Consumer Tax Index is meant to show how the tax bill has changed over time. Last year’s average tax burden of $39,299 is almost three times what Canadians paid in 1961, after adjusting for inflation – and has risen much faster than the cost of necessities, including housing, the institute said.
No wonder so many are drowning in debt. Clothing and food might be relatively cheap but the cost of shelter and taxes have skyrocketed. Guess what? The governments are largely to blame for the insane real estate bubble as well.
In my area, houses that sold for $250,000 twenty years ago are now being put on the market for close to a million dollars! Even those "rich" people are going to be slaves to their local bank if they want to buy those lavish closets.
Mass immigration drives down wages and jacks up rent.
— Stefan Molyneux (@StefanMolyneux) 20 January 2020
It has been brutal for the poor. https://t.co/cRMU0YDrwK
Worse, they don't understand this basic math. Most support the very same politicians who champion their continued misery via open borders. It's just sad.