You stupid ignorant American piece of shit. You economy did go in the toilet and Canadian banks did not even catch a fucking cold.
My bank manager gave me a copy of a memo that was on her desk back in the summer of 2008 after your banks went for a shit.
It was basically a memo from the top that was laughing at all of the stupid American banks and assured the managers that the Canadian banks would not be affected in the least.
America and it's holy sacred constitution have jumped the shark.
America goes, 10 minutes later Israel is gone, muzzies get back to their business, England smartens up because they don't have the USA pushing them around anymore.
Posted 3/14/2010 10:34 am
There's a global market for oil. In any case, the US will keep buying Canadian oil until we hit Mad Max levels of apocalypse.
Posted 3/14/2010 1:41 pm
Eugenics would eliminate the need for most medical care. Insurance companies would give huge discounts to defect-free customers. Of course, everybody gets old and dies eventually so suicide should be legal, at least for people over 80. Live a long, healthy life and then go out in a morphine haze. Many people actually do this now. Everyone should.
Posted 3/14/2010 5:51 pm
The whole concept of insurance with regard to health care makes no sense to me whatsoever. Take deductibles, for example. On some level deductibles might make sense for automobiles but they have the opposite effect with health care. That being, the fact that deductibles exist means that patients avoid health care until things are desperate as they know that the first big chunk of the costs have to come out of their pockets. That's counter-intuitive. You would think that a successful system would promote good health and early diagnosis of problems. Not penalize people for this kind of behavior.
Also, having health insurance be part of an employer's responsibility to potential employees is an idea that no longer works. Everybody understands how it got started and those situations simply no longer exist. It's a huge burden on employers and there is not reason for employers to be in that business. It just makes everything that the employer does more expensive, and that affects their ability to compete.
Job #1 has to be to get rid of the for-profit insurance companies in the equation.
Posted 3/14/2010 5:57 pm
sorry to bother you with facts, but 'the evil insurance companies' make about 3% return on investment and rank 81st compared to the top 100 major industries.
Return on investment? WTF are you talking about? They don't invest in anything. The collect money and figure out how to pay as few claims as possible. That is why they are in business, and their goal of maximizing profits ensures that they will do everything possible to deny claims and to kick people off their rolls that pose a statistical threat to their future profitability.
Posted 3/14/2010 6:09 pm
Reading the newspapers these days, you have to wonder whether Canada was on another planet when the global credit crisis hit. House prices have actually increased in some provinces and now there is a shortage of houses for sale in southern Ontario. Credit is flowing everywhere.
But what few Canadians realize is that the housing market has avoided collapse (prices are down 32 per cent in the U.S.) because the Harper Conservatives directed the CMHC to change the mortgage rules to effectively make the Canadian government the biggest sub-prime lender in the world. What's almost as alarming as this reckless policy is that no one in the financial media is talking about it, even though everyone knows the facts. I was alerted to the scandal by David Lepoidevin, a financial advisor with National Bank Financial, in a warning letter to his clients.
The facts are that over 90 per cent of existing mortgages in Canada are "securitized." That is the practice of pooling mortgages (or other assets) and then issuing new securities backed by the pool -- MBSs, or Mortgage Backed Securities. That's what happened with the sub-prime mortgages in the U.S. which (because the whole pool was so diversified) received triple-A ratings by the rating agencies. Losses around the world amounted to hundred of billions of dollars
Credit is still tight in the U.S. because no private investor has the stomach for such risky MBSs. That's because those losses were private and not back-stopped by any government. In Canada, mortgages have been securitized for years. The Canadian-issued securitizations are called National Housing Act, Mortgage-Backed Securities. Unlike the failed U.S. pools, says Lepoidevin, "In order to find buyers for securitized mortgage pools, the Government of Canada has put guarantees on them" by directing CMHC to guarantee all Canadian mortgages.
I'm Canadian and I knew this and I have no illusions that we're somehow "better" than the US. We're in the same fucking banker boat and we can expect the same economic shitstorm as the US.
And hold on to your seats folks, yes you too Americans. The shitstorm has just begun. We're headed for round too and it's going to be much much worse than round one.
