Jay Currie

GM warned last month that its auditors, Deloitte & Touche, could raise those concerns, but the announcement underscored the stakes for G.M. as it sought up to $30 billion in government aid to restructure with a bankruptcy filing.

“Our recurring losses from operations, stockholders’ deficit and inability to generate sufficient cash flow to meet our obligations [...]

BMO Financial Group said Tuesday it is purchasing the Canadian business of beleaguered insurance giant American International Group Inc. in an all-cash transaction valued at $375-million. financial post

I guess this is what Canadian banks do when the feds take B-assets off their books.

The Republican leader, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said: “We have had before us this whole question of the viability of the American automobile manufacturers. None of us want to see them go down, but very few of us had anything to do with the dilemma that they have created for themselves.”

Mr. McConnell added: “The [...]

Time to put out news you want to bury:

May 23, 2008
Ottawa, Ontario

Today, the Prime Minister’s Office issued the following statement:

Upon receipt of the Report on the Investigation into Unauthorized Disclosure of Sensitive Diplomatic Information, the following conclusions are noted:

Any comments Mr. Brodie may have made during the lock-up did not reveal any information tied to [...]

Aw, look at the cute little Canadian babies! It’s all very sweet and innocuous, right?

Don’t believe it. Read between the lines, and you realize this is a sinister Canadian plot to take over America. Canada’s military is no match for ours, so the crafty Canucks are using infancy instead of infantry to carry out their [...]

Bear Stearns was bailed out on Friday. Very much a temporary fix and very much part of an ongoing process of financial musical chairs in which, when the music stops, there is no chair left.

People like Jim Kunstler can barely contain their glee. After all, the potential collapse of the American financial system just proved [...]

At the end of WWII Switzerland was unscathed, had a strong currency and a sophisticated – and secretive – banking system. When my parents got there in 1960 it was awash in currency. So much so that my father bought a house which had a negative mortgage. That’s right, the bank paid him to own [...]

Is it just me or are these the ugliest coins you’ve ever seen…

Washington looks pissed, Adams stunned, Jefferson mono browed and poor Madison simply distorted: give me a .90 loonie any time.

via fark

The left side of the American blogosphere will be cracking open a few bottle of organic champagn and basking in the glory of defeating three term Senator and Vice Presidential candidate Joe Lieberman in tonight’s Connecticut Democratic primary. Ned Lamont, to the manor born, will be sipping something a tad more vintage and being amazed [...]

Glenn Reynolds notes:

This week, crude spun out of Canada’s oil sands came all the way to this flat Oklahoma prairie town that’s known as the oil pipeline capital of the world.

Enbridge, a Calgary-based oil delivery and storage company, opened the taps to its Spearhead Pipeline, a 650-mile stretch of steel from Chicago to Cushing, and [...]

What fun. Gore has pretty much given up writing his alternative State of the Union message; but our own Ian Welsh at Tilting at Windmills and the Blogging of the President has picked up the torch.

The US is bankrupt.
tilting at windmills Ian leads off. Well, to paraphrase Bill Clinton, “It depends on what you [...]

I can’t resist a furrther reflection on Ambassador Wilkins’ speech. Imagine the effrontery of the man, in the face of Rick Mercer, pointing out:

Wilkins noted the United States has a better track record on cutting its greenhouse-gas emissions, as a percentage of its total, than Canada does.

Since Kyoto was signed, Canada’s greenhouse-gas emissions have gone [...]

“It may be smart election-year politics to thump your chest and criticize your friend and your No. 1 trading partner constantly,” Ambassador David Wilkins said in a speech to the Canadian Club in Ottawa on Tuesday.

“But it is a slippery slope, and all of us should hope that it doesn’t have a long-term impact on [...]

The Coburn amendment(s) designed to cut pork from the budget and reassign the funds to pay for Katerina recovery went down to defeat in the Senate today. 86-13. It was not even close.

No one who pays attention to American politics should be surprised. Larding spending bills with bridges to no where and sculpture gardens in [...]

Keeping the perps out is job #1. But, as the article in the Brandon Sun finally points out in the last graf, this is not Canada’s fault, the American authorities still have Martha grounded. A fact carefully concealed by this wonderfully misleading headline, “Martha Stewart not allowed into Canada for pumpkin festival”. It fooled [...]

(via the flea)

Gen. Hillier said he was confident that if his U.S. counterparts needed help, they would ask.

“In short, we want to be ready to go as soon as any need is identified that we may be able to fill,” he said.

He said he also made the offer to the U.S. Ambassador David Wilkins.

Gen. Hillier [...]

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Katrina is a massive tragedy for millions of Americans. You know they would be there for us; now we all have a chance to be there for them.

Right now New Orleans, a lot of Mississippi, and the gulf coast is either under water or covered in debris, oil slicks and garbage. Levees are breaking, people are being plucked off roofs. The fact that Katrinawas not a Cat5 storm has made very little difference in terms of the suffering and the loss the [...]

“The markets will treat it like it’s Tyrannosaurus rex, but bigger,” said David Pursell, an energy analyst with Houston’s Pickering Energy Partners.

Likely signaling what’s ahead, Sunday night, when electronic trading resumed on the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil futures spiked $4.50 per barrel, putting the cost above $70 for the first time since oil [...]

Aaron over at Grandinite writes,

So the Liberals are going on an Anti-American tirade in order to get more support from Ontarians, eh? Under the guise of sticking it to the big, bad bald eagle to the south, the Liberals could slap an export tax on natural gas, the fountain from which Alberta gets its [...]