Jay Currie

I am on a half a vacation. Work in the mornings and evenings but take my youngest to a sports camp for the afternoon and just mooch about. Lovely pub lunch in Cadboro Bay today. Down to the beach to watch the kids race boats and to note that either girls are becoming bigger or [...]

Stephen Harper’s Conservatives have managed to come within a swinging distance of out-doing Pierre Trudeau’s increase in the size of government. By sheer numbers, the Harper Conservatives have increased the size of government since they took power by somewhere in the range of 26%. And they are also running the largest deficit in Canadian history, [...]

At the heart of the proposal is the idea of raiding the state’s bottle deposits for the next 20 years and then getting an $8.7-billion loan from Wall Street. The programs currently funded by bottle deposits would be reimbursed by a new tax on oil production.

Perez (D-Los Angeles) called his budget plan a “unique and [...]

May Day! Time to sing of Solidarity and generally wax nostalgic of the God who Failed.

I was in Vancouver for three days and, as it was largely to support my mum as she had surgery (which went well, and the nice gent who is the hospital social worker said, “Amazing, 85 and sharp as a [...]

Shares in Canadian Oil Sands Trust (COS.UN-T32.702.006.51%) climbed Monday amid reports that Sinopec, Asia’s biggest refiner, plans to buy ConocoPhillips’ (COP-N55.960.641.15%) stake in Syncrude Canada, the world’s largest oil sands development. globe and mail

A couple of points. First, apparently the Asians are unworried about “dirty oil”. Second, and more to the point, while the US [...]

Spring was at least hinted at today; except for the wind. I wandered over to my barbers and then looped through a few other streets to get a little exercise. Earlier I had the big golden dog out for a good long walk. The “For Sale” signs are sprouting as they always do in Spring.

Listings [...]

A flood of new property listings in the Greater Vancouver region has helped to put the market into balanced territory between buyers and sellers, the Real Estate Board of Greater Vancouver said Tuesday.

The board said owners listed some 7,004 homes for sale on the Multiple Listing Service in March, some 60 per cent more than [...]

But it appears that worst of the Great Collapse is behind us. So what’s Harper’s deficit machine of a finance Minister, Jim Flaherty, going to do?

The answer is … spend even more money, but disguise it as an austerity budget.

David MacKinnon, a former senior bureaucrat, bank executive and chief executive of the Ontario Hospital Association, said the report brings into focus the failings of a massive, wasteful, program.

He criticized successive federal governments for failing to address the problem.

“Unbelievably, the Government of Canada has never undertaken a serious study of the consequences of shifting $40- [...]

It would be lovely if the hipster had a clue…

h/t Celestial Junk

When Kaupthing raised its stake to 19.5 percent, Shearer finally flew to Reykjavík to see who on earth these Icelanders were. “They were very different,” he told the House of Commons committee. “They ran their business in a very strange way. Everyone there was incredibly young. They were all from the same community in Reykjavík. [...]

My complaint is not just that the Conservatives have abandoned conservatism themselves — which is annoying to me mostly because I believe there should be a conservative alternative, even if I don’t necessarily subscribe to it. But they’ve closed off the possibility of anyone else applying it either. They haven’t moved the middle to them, [...]

4. Radical change is easier than small or gradual change. That might sound counter-intuitive, at first glance, but here’s the rationale: in the short period of time in which people are motivated to attempt change (e.g. during or following a crisis), radical change leads to faster and more quickly noticeable results. The quick results, then, [...]

• had a trade surplus of Cdn$126 million in February as exports rose 5.2% to $33.1-billion during the month when “Most economists expected a decline of $1.2-billion”. This followed deficits of Cdn$1.15-billion in January and Cdn$652-million in December; and,

• lost 63,100 jobs in March, pushing the the unemployment rate to a seven-year high of 8%, [...]

I was downtown today and noticed that a local coffee franchise shop, which was almost always busy, has closed. I don’t know why – margins vs. rent I suspect; but it means that a bunch of barristas are no longer earning minimum wage and tips.

Here in Victoria the downturn shows up mainly in the “For [...]

England is broke. For a whole bunch of reasons, including the gross mismanagement of some of her banks and the wealth destruction implicit in an ever expanding government, England is very close to not being able to pay her bills.

The mob, and there is no mob like the London mob, has realized that something has [...]

It is my hope that the steps I am announcing today will go a long way towards answering many of the questions people may have about the future of GM and Chrysler. But just in case there are still nagging doubts, let me say it as plainly as I can—if you buy a car from [...]

We are going to hear a great deal in the next few days about the replacement of the US dollar by an alternative reserve currency. Various well advised politicians at the G-20 will suggest/demand/plead for IMF SDRs to be a substitute or Euros (as if) or a basket of currencies and so on.

The interesting [...]

This particular decision feels like a judge anxious to order to disclosure, despite the weight of authority that provides some measure of privacy protection for anonymous posters. Indeed, the public policy issue is characterized as “we are dealing with an anti-hate speech advocate and Defendants whose website is so controversial that it is blocked [...]

President Obama is smart, articulate, and to me seems well intentioned. He has to know such ‘fixes’ are not available without huge monetary cost and over a very long period of time.

A union leader essentially ask about comparative sharing of returns between capital and labour. President Obama referenced Henry Ford who Obama said [...]