Daniel and Henrik Dangerfield

I saw this headline linked from another site, "Anson Carter: Where would the Sedins be without me?" and I assumed it was an Onion-style satire, but apparently not.

The article says, "The 2005-06 campaign represents the Sedins’ coming-out party; their pronouncement to the hockey world that there was something special about their skills and their chemistry."

and that, "Carter also saw something that season and even if he couldn’t project what the twins would become — largely because no one could..."

In response, let me just link back to one of the few times I've posted on hockey on this blog, back at the start of 05-06 season when I pointed out that the Sedins were doing fine, they just needed more ice time and time on the power play. And they got more ice time and more time on the power play in 05-06 and their point totals went up right in line with that increase.

I also love how the article notes that a) Carter wanted $3 million/year, b) he was out of the league at the end of the season after he didn't get it, and c) the Sedins went on to bigger and netter things with him gone, but still manages to make it seem like it was possibly the wrong decision not to give Carter the $3 million he wanted.

None of this matters, I guess, it would just be nice if people (in the media in particular) paid more attention to reality. And yes, I've been blogging for many years, so I suppose I must be a slow learner since I haven't learned to just live with this sort of nonsense by now.

The Difference Between Lending and Democracy

I read an article many years ago that questioned why banks were getting out of the student loan business when almost 3/4 of students paid back their loans. What the reporter failed to understand was that, unlike 'democracy', where if you have 40% of the people onside you're good to go with a 'majority' government, in the lending business you need a far, far higher percentage of loans to repay you in order to stay solvent.

The logic is simple (especially when lending to 'prime' customers (people with a relatively clean credit history, i.e. most people), where margins are fairly tight) - it takes a lot of 'good' loans that repay in full to offset one bad loan that a bank has to write-off.

I was reminded of this simple truth when reading an article in the Vancouver Sun today, which offered as good news that, "Almost three-quarters of respondents in the RBC poll said they are well positioned to withstand a decline in the housing market."

That is not good news! If there was a decline in the housing market, and one quarter of Canadians were not able to 'withstand it,' that would be a massive financial crisis for this country.

The Corporate Media

In chart form, your corporate media at work in the 2008 Canadian Federal election:

Here's how the people voted (click to enlarge):



And here's how the media voted:



Over 60% of Canadians voted for the Liberals, NDP, Bloc or Greens and yet, in the entire country, there were only 2 daily newspapers (with any sort of circulation), The Toronto Star, and Le Devoir, that were in alignment with this overwhelming majority of Canadians voters.

I know this is obvious to anyone who pays attention, but I think putting it in chart form makes it extra clear that the media might just be a little out of touch with, and further right than, the population at large. Who could have guessed that wealthy corporate types might be more right wing than average Canadians?

Modern Astrology

Here are some quotes from a recent Globe and Mail article in the business section. It's talking about Plutonic Power Corporation, but it could be talking about any company and it would make no difference.

"The charts for Plutonic Power Corp. (PCC-T2.320.125.45%) will give us a better idea of trend, support, and resistance in searching for opportunity. ... The three-year chart is not what I would call particularly attractive. PCC was range bound with support at $3.00 and resistance at $4.00 over the period May 2009 to May of 2010. After May of this year the stock broke below support at $3.00 and then held on to $2.40 but quickly found new lows at $1.50. PCC has caught a bounce from the rock bottom at $1.50 and is coming out of an oversold situation. ... The six-month chart illustrates the weakness in the stock and the inability to break the downtrend. There was an eight-day rise that took the stock higher in August of 2010, but it was short-lived.

The RSI signalled that the stock was oversold in October which attracted some buying. The MACD appears to be turning higher but notice the resistance at $2.20.

PCC has given bottom fishers lots of head fakes, baiting them into the market only to shred their capital. At this point, the stock is still fighting the downtrend and if you are thinking of stepping into this name, don’t be surprised if you get a shock."

This is what is referred to amongst stock market astrologists as 'Technical Analysis'.

As Wikipedia notes,

"Whether technical analysis actually works is a matter of controversy. Methods vary greatly, and different technical analysts can sometimes make contradictory predictions from the same data. Many investors claim that they experience positive returns, but academic appraisals often find that it has little predictive power."

The 'idea' of technical analysis is that there are patterns in stock market charts that will help you predict what will happen next. In my opinion, it's all about as plausible as the notion that an Octopus could predict the outcomes of World Cup games. But whereas Paul the Octopus was treated as a novelty, technical analysis is taken seriously by enough people that we get columns in our most serious national newspaper, talking earnestly about MACD's and RSI's.

I love the last line in the article, "Make it a massive weekend and Happy Capitalism!" If only Max Weber was still around today to hear people talking about technical analysis, the modern version of the mysticism and witchcraft of the middle ages that was supplanted by the rational capitalistic age, and referring to it, with no sense of irony, as capitalism!

Crowded Marketplace

From a Globe and Mail editorial today, "Under the Conservatives, Canada has maintained its position of global leadership. ... It may hedge on an issue like climate change, but..."

The Conservatives never seem to get more than 40% of the vote in this country, and the marketplace already has lots of newspapers such as the Sun Chain and the National Joke that serve that portion of the population that believes Canada has shown global leadership under the Conservatives, while 'hedging' on climate change.

I guess it's no shocker that the Toronto Star continues to have the highest weekly circulation in the country. A believer in free-markets might wonder why the obvious opportunity to profit handsomely from running a newspaper that isn't so ideologically right-wing that it prints nonsense like the Globe editorial above continues to remain untaken.

Dog Bites Man

Actually, I've lived my whole life as a boy/man, and haven't been bitten by a dog yet. But a Neil Reynolds column that is a deliberate lie meant to deceive readers of the Globe and Mail into believing something that isn't true, I have seen. Many times.

Greg documents the latest, Reynolds suggesting that Canada shouldn't have a mandatory census because the Scandinavians don't, when anyone who's paying attention at all knows that if Canada wanted to adopt the Scandinavian system (where the government collects so much information on everyone that they don't *need* a census), Reynolds would be the first person fighting against it.

To be honest, given that the Globe and Mail continues to employ Neil Reynolds after years and years of every column of his being either an attempt at deception or hilariously bad advice, it's hard to take anything in the paper seriously, or believe that the editors really have any concern whatsoever for producing a publicly useful product as opposed to just selling papers.

Even if the Globe wanted to make the argument that Reynolds is useful in a George Castanza, do-the-opposite, sort of way, like a compass that always points South, surely they could just provide his advice on what (not to) do directly to policymakers, without taking up valuable newsprint and possibly temporarily fooling people who are reading the Globe for the first time, or those poor folks with an IQ under 50 who haven't yet figured out that they should ignore (or do the opposite of) everything Reynolds says.

Don't Panic

I remember during the 2008 Olympics, Canada had no medals after the first week and there were great cries of anguish across the nation. A few voices of reason tried pointing out that the vast majority of events where Canada had a shot at medals were scheduled for the 2nd week of Olympics but they were generally drowned out by cries wondering where we had gone so wrong and what had caused such a disaster. Of course, as it turned out, Canada ended up with 18 medals and one of it's better showings at the Summer Olympics.

So I'm sympathetic to 'Own the Podium' CEO Roger Jackson's recent attempt to preempt the same sort of media nonsense from recurring in Vancouver. But his comments that Germany and the U.S. would have more good medal chances earlier in the competition piqued my curiosity. So I took a look at the Associated Press' event by event medal predictions and matched them up against which day the events were going to occur on to produce the following chart:



As you can see (following the red line on the chart - click on the chart to enlarge it), based on AP's predictions, Jackson has a point. Both men's and women's hockey and curling, as well as the short and long track relays all happen towards the end of the Olympics and these are all decent chances for a medal for Canada.

Media Illiteracy

From the Globe and Mail:

"Seven of the members of the Group of 20 nations are on a trajectory that will leave them with debts bigger than 75 per cent of their economies by 2014" ... "Even in Canada, a relative paragon of fiscal prudence, the combined gross debt of the federal and provincial governments is on pace to reach 79 per cent of gross domestic product next year"

So here's 3 statements in those 2 paragraphs:
1) 7 out of the G20 nations will have a public debt/GDP ratio above 75% by 2014.
2) Canada's ratio will be at 79% next year.
3) Canada is a relative paragon of fiscal prudence.

OK then.

Since I'm posting, I have to say I find it somewhat mystifying how much more attention high levels of public debt get vs. high levels of private debt. I understand there being some more focus on the public debt, but the ratio seems way out of proportion - especially given events of the last few years.

The Emperor's New Snack

Back on July 3 as I'm sure you heard, Stephen Harper, our Prime Minister, took communion (a no-no as a non-Catholic to begin with) and, instead of eating it right away, either kept it in his hand or put it in his pocket, wandered away and sat down without ever taking a bite.

The video is pretty clear.

If that was the whole story, I could just acknowledge that our Prime Minister is a) ignorant of the basic rituals of the most common religion in the country he is Prime Minister of and b) does the wrong thing under pressure, and move on. These aren't great qualities in a leader, but whatever. Harper had inexplicably gone up for Communion with something in one hand so it would have been easy enough to clarify that he had to sit down and put down what he was carrying and then consume the host properly. Or that he was unfamiliar with the Catholic ritual since he's not Catholic. Or that he was trying to shake hands with the Priest, not receive communion or whatever the true story is.

But instead, we were treated to the strange spectacle of all the news outlets running stories like this one at CTV where we hear that,

"After the video clip was released, a spokesperson for the PMO said Harper was offered the wafer by a Catholic priest at the funeral, that he accepted it and then consumed it."

...and comments by Harper that,

"I think somebody running a story -- and I don't know where the responsibility lies -- somebody running an unsubstantiated story that I would stick communion bread in my pocket is really absurd, and I think it's a real, frankly, a low point, a low moment in journalism whoever is responsible for this,"

The whole thing was ridiculous. We can see the video. Whose credibility does it benefit for the PM and his office to just lie to our faces as if we were either blind or complete idiots and for the media to just report it as if the video evidence wasn't clear?

Still, I let it slide until I saw this story that people actually lost their jobs for daring to point out the obvious, video supported, but embarassing truth about our PM.

The CBC article says that, "The publisher and editor of the New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal are no longer with the paper after it was forced to apologize to Stephen Harper and two of its own reporters over a story about whether the prime minister took communion at the state funeral of former governor general Roméo LeBlanc."

Forced by who?

One of the reasons I generally prefer reading blogs to the corporate media when possible is that when the media is so under control that people lose their job for saying inconvenient things about the PM - even when their comments are supported by video evidence - it's pretty obvious that you can't trust what you're reading (and more to the point, what you're not reading) too much. Yeah, bloggers can be biased and unreliable but they're not (as far as I know) censored so it lets me read the opinions of people who can actually say what they think without fear and then judge for myself.

It looks like Orwell might have been an optimist thinking that in order for the lie to become truth, you actually needed to first modify or destroy the video evidence showing the 'truth' to be a lie.

---
As an aside, thinking about this story, I couldn't help but recall the incident where the National Post falsely reported that Iran was forcing religious minorities to wear coloured badges identifying their religious status.

At the time Harper did not comment on this as a low point in journalism, instead noting that, "Unfortunately we’ve seen enough already from the Iranian regime to suggest that it is very capable of this kind of action."

I don't recall ever hearing about anyone losing their job over that one (and the apology was run on page 2, not the front page like it was in this case), but of course fabricating a story that likens a country that is a possible military target to Nazi Germany pales in significance compared to commenting on the clear video evidence that the PM walked away with a little JC in his hand/pocket. Why do I suspect that the modern version of the Emperor's New Clothes ends with a slander suit against the child...

Most One Sided Comment Thread Ever...

The 'liberal' media at work.

I've heard the theory expressed that the Republican party is in a death spiral in that, as moderates leave, the remainder becomes more wingnutty, which drives away more moderates and so on, until you end up with pretty much just crazy people in the party (i.e. the current situation), but it hadn't occurred to me until now that the same dynamic might play out in the media as well.

Close That Barn Door

A decent article in Macleans on the housing industry, other than it is about 1-2 years too late.

Some quotes,

"Kassam is just one of thousands of people getting buried in the rubble of Vancouver’s collapsing prices; a dream market has turned into a nightmare, faster than anyone thought possible.

...

"economists are warily backing away from their sunny predictions, and grappling with a question no one has posed for 20 years: how bad is it going to get? It's becoming increasingly likely that the answer to that question will be 'even worse than you imagined.'

...

"'No one even came close to realizing the impact of this crisis,' Kassam says. Back when he signed the pre-sale agreement, he was following the news, and 'they said the real estate market was slowing down, but they were only predicting maybe a one or two per cent drop in property values—nothing to this extent.' But Kassam has learned that you shouldn't always believe what you read in the papers and what the economists say on TV."

The article, (and I meant it, it is a good article, by media standards), goes on to set up American economist Robert Shiller and a housing futures market as the ultimate sources of wisdom on the fate of the housing market. And while these are certainly sources to take into consideration, personally, I think it might have been worth nothing some of the local folks who did see all this coming.

All the News That's Fit to Print (2)

(Part 1 here)

A little more fodder for the post I will write someday on whether the decline of the newspaper industry is a good or a bad thing. Warren Kinsella notes that the National Post wouldn't run his column because, "We're not in the business of praising the likes of Rick Salutin, tremonti, etc."

Will it really be so sad when they're not in any business any more?

Stephen Gordon has more on the valuable services provided to our nation by the news media.

Demeaning the Discourse

One of the things that always struck me about the U.S. was the ability of people, particularly on the right, to basically say whatever stupid blatant self serving lies they wanted without suffering any penalty or really being called on it. A key turning point in the last U.S. election was when that started to change, for example Phil Gramm being forced to step down after calling the U.S. a nation of whiners.

So it was discouraging to see Harper get away with all the blatant, obvious to anyone with a functioning brain, easily verifiable lies about the carbon tax in the last election (its not revenue neutral, it will destroy the economy, it will break up the country, it will eat your children while they sleep, etc.

Having been allowed to just fabricate whatever stories he likes during the campaign no matter how absurd, it is not surprising to see Harper keep lying after the election.

"[Harper] saved his strongest criticism for what went on before Mr. Obama, suggesting at one point that Canada really couldn't get on with much on climate change until Mr. Obama got to office. He conveniently avoided mentioning that his government joined Mr. Bush's in actively opposing aggressive climate-change policies."

If it wasn't for that nasty George Bush, Canada would be a leader in fighting climate change. It was George Bush that made Harper argue that a carbon tax would break up the country and destroy the economy, even though George Bush's reign was drawing to a certain close as Harper made those statements.

A primary objective of those who don't want to see Canada go down the same dead end streets the U.S. has gone down, should be building up a noise machine loud enough to make folks like Harper pay when they insult our intelligence with nonsense like this.

All the News That's Fit to Print

Some fodder for the post I'm eventually going to write about whether we're better off with or without the print media - a little seetype from Garth ' No Greater Fool' Turner,

"A year ago, as I related in my recent book, the real estate editor of a major newspaper who gave “Greater Fool” a full-page review (critical, but interesting) told me months later that was the kiss of death. After advertisers complained, he ended up on the overnight layout desk. The new real estate editor writes about funky paint colours and throw cushions.

But the sponsors left anyway. They smelled the smoke."

Cheap Shots

Neil Reynolds, August 15, 2007, Globe and Mail:

"What's the best way to expand a welfare state, irrationally assuming for the moment that you want to expand a welfare state? Cut taxes. Especially cut corporate taxes. You will collect less revenue every time you nick a dollar but you will have many more dollars to nick - and you will almost certainly find yourself with more tax revenue than you know what to do with. Iceland is a good example."

Willem Buiter, January 21, 2009, Financial Times (London):

"Iceland’s largest three banks with border-crossing activities collapsed last fall, as did its currency. The three banks are in administration and new state-owned banks with a purely domestic focus have been set up. Strict capital controls make external borrowing all but impossible and discourage foreign investment. The country now has an IMF program.

...

Iceland’s government had to let the country’s three main banks go into administration because it did not have the fiscal capacity to bail out financial institutions with balance sheets amounting to 600-700 per cent of annual GDP. Any attempt to commit further government resources to the rescue of the banking system would have precipitated a sovereign default.

...

The excesses in Iceland during the past decade were greater than in the UK, but not qualitatively different. In both countries, the regulation of banks was laughably lax.

...

Households were permitted, indeed encouraged, to accumulate excessive debt - around 170 per cent of household disposable income in the UK, over 210 percent in Iceland.

...

Both countries permitted the real exchange rate of their currencies to become materially over-valued, more so in Iceland than in the UK, but still to a worrying extent even in the UK. The same version of the ‘Dutch disease’ - the crowding out of the non-financial internationally exposed sectors (exporting and import-competing) by the excessive growth of the financial sector and the construction industry - occurred in both countries, again to a greater extent in Iceland than in the UK, but to an highly undesirable extent even in the UK. Iceland’s gross and net external indebtedness are much greater than that of the UK, and its current account deficits during the years just prior to the crisis were much larger than those of the UK.

Both countries pay the price for the hubris of policymakers who believed that they had engineered the end of boom and bust and replaced it with perpetual boom. The risks associated with asset market and credit booms and bubbles were dismissed (”how can you be sure it is a bubble? Do you know better than the market etc.”). In neither country have the responsible parties (the prime minister, the minister of finance, the governor of the central bank and the head of banking regulation and supervision) admitted any personal responsibility for the disaster. Instead we are told tales of a once-in-a-lifetime calamity, coming at us from abroad, that ruined a perfectly sensible and sustainable set of domestic policies, regulations, rules and arrangements. As if!"

Neil Reynolds, January 9, 2009: Globe and Mail:

"Why Government Can't Stop Market Crashes"

The man really has no shame. But of course there are always going to be ideological hacks who move on blithely from failed prediction to failed recommendation and back to failed prediction without ever a word of apology, a reconsideration of their premises or a questioning of the ideology that blinds them. The question is why the Globe and Mail thinks one of these people should be one of their columnists.

Sphere of Deviance

Via Atrios, an interesting piece by Jay Rosen at Pressthink on the role of the media in defining the boundaries of accepted, acceptable and unacceptable debate, and how the internet erodes the control of the media by allowing individual citizens and groups to connect directly rather than being passive receivers of the mainstream media.

With the provincial election coming up in May, and another referendum on changing our electoral system from the obsolete first past the post system to the single transferable vote system proposed by the Citizens Assembly, it made me think about the role the media plays in the debate on electoral reform.

One of the things I've always been unable to understand is just why the media is so opposed to electoral reform. In fact, one of the first posts on this blog (back in 2004!) concluded by asking, "What is it about PR [proportional representation] that leads columnists to write such absurd things? What are they afraid of?"

The reason I asked was because despite being opposed to electoral reform, most of the folks in the media seemed unable to put together a coherent explanation for *why* they were opposed, seeming to come to a conclusion first and then go looking for supporting arguments, much in the way of drunkards and lampposts.

Some of the journalists /columnists who oppose reform, Bill Tieleman comes to mind, are simply partisans who feel the reform will hurt their party and argue accordingly, but many of them seem to just have some instinctive reaction to defend the status quo.

After reading Jay's piece, I can see how in some ways that [defending the status quo, or the views of the establishment], is one of the most important functions the media has, but they're not aware of it so they do it instinctively, without even realizing what they're doing or why. I don't know if this insight can help the STV (Single Transferrable Vote) proposal get less hostile media coverage this time around, but maybe the greater strength of the internet (where support for reform is high) vs. the media now vs. 4 years ago will help shape the debate in terms more favourably towards reform.

The Trouble With Economists

So many disagreements and misunderstandings seem to arise from people using different definitions for the same word.

Take 'economists' for example. A little while back Stephen Gordon, himself an economist as far as I know, wrote a post entitled "Economists' fatal flaw: Diffidence". It's a short post which argues that economists didn't point out the housing bubble because it didn't fit their models and when the data doesn't fir their models, economists just stay quiet. He concludes by asking, "I wonder to what extent the world would be a better place if economists were as arrogant as non-economists claim they are."

Meanwhile, the other day saw a big headline in the Globe and Mail, "Economists' advice to Flaherty: cut taxes now"

The article starts,

"Canada's top private-sector economists have a message for Jim Flaherty as the federal Finance Minister prepares his critical recession-fighting budget: Cut taxes now, rein in spending later."

and later on...

"Mr. Drummond and others added that tax cuts now would have to be balanced in 2010 and beyond by a tightening of program spending, which throughout this decade has consistently grown faster than inflation and the economy.

"We do have to see these permanent tax cuts - that's really the only thing that will influence behaviour in the economy," agreed Craig Wright, chief economist at Royal Bank of Canada. "But in the out years, when we hope and think the economy will be in a recovery mode, then you can rein in program spending, because that's something that has been running quite rapidly."

The claims about rising federal spending that are made by these economists are easily refuted (for anyone who doesn't do business reporting for the Globe and Mail, at any rate) nonsense, as Erin Weir points out over at Relentlessly Progressive Economics.

But how to square this article with Gordon's theory of the diffident economist? How to square the group of economists in the front pages of the paper offering a series of right wing prescriptions supported by neither fact nor theory with the economist unwilling to point out a housing bubble because it doesn't fit his models?

You can't reconcile these two groups, because these are not the same economists. On the one hand, we have what we might call 'newspaper economists' who seem to function primarily as big business shills and see tax cuts, interest rate cuts and spending cuts as the solution to every problem whether it be boom or bust, surplus or deficit. On the other hand, we have 'academic economists' who take on the thankless and to date mostly unsuccessful (in macroeconomics, anyway) task of trying to understand economics well enough to build a theory of economics that will actually prove useful, occasionally blogging but generally leaving the public stage to the corporate, newspaper economists (although certainly the biases of the media towards simplistic partisan answers doesn't help with the relative coverage the two groups get).

There are a few exceptions to this paradigm, in particular Paul Krugman, but they're more of the exception that proves the rule than the norm.

Down With The Print Media

One of these days, I may or may not get around to writing a post on the ongoing decline of the newspaper industry covering topics such as, will newspapers disappear in their current form (yes) and will it be a good thing (probably).

A year ago, I likely would have been more favourably disposed towards the print media, but, as impossible as it might have seemed 12 months ago, the most recent year has lowered my opinion of them significantly.

Two of the main catalysts for this change in attitude were the media treatment of the coalition government (when the media was scared into showing its establishment roots, fronting absurd push polls, calling the NDP commies and screaming for daddy figures to ride to the rescue) and the media coverage of the Green Shift.


For example, consider this from the Globe and Mail's year end / next year look-ahead editorial, "The Liberals were all too happy to accuse the Tories of inaction [with respect to the economic crisis], but did not offer alternative policies so much as the promise of consultation, and refused to move away from their Green Shift plan despite how ill-timed a risky wealth transfer would have been."

"a risky wealth transfer" So, in what way was it risky? In all its coverage, did the Globe identify a single risk from the plan? What might such a risk be? We've had increases in gas taxes over the last 30 years many times, we've had cuts to income taxes many times. As far as I know there hasn't really been any particular risk to such moves.

And also "ill-timed" Why was it ill-timed? Because carbon prices were plunging? But wouldn't that be the ideal time to implement such a shift, to preserve the incentives to conserve? Because the economy was deteriorating? But what difference would the source of taxation matter to the economy - and to the extent that the shift was progressive in nature, wouldn't it mitigate the economic slowdown by putting more money in the hands of those likely to spend it?

The truth is, the person writing the Globe editorial didn't consider these questions. It never occurred to them that to use words that had an actual meaning in reality, they simply were looking to criticize the green shift, didn't want to point out that it was good policy supported by anyone who understood the issues and was unpopular thanks to demagoguing politicians who were amply enabled by the media, and simply picked a few empty words to fill in their sentence such as "ill-timed" and "risky", before moving on the next point.

Consider that this is the Globe and Mail, arguably one of the better newspapers in the country (it's a relative measure), and in their year end summary they have nothing but a few words of offhand, meaningless bs to offer with regard to one of the most important policy debates we faced this year.

As I said, this topic needs a more thorough coverage - I haven't really explained my full thought process in this post, I'm just typing out my impressions. It could be that this is all just sour grapes on my part that a policy I think is a good one was treated with disdain by the media. And maybe newspapers contribute enough of value that they're worth preserving (any suggestions what that value might be?). Or maybe whatever might fill the vacuum if they disappeared (crap like this) would be worse. But more and more I'm convinced that newspapers do more harm than good and that it will be a cause for celebration when they are delivered for the last time.

Zeno Has Nothing On These Guys

The Globe Editorialists ponder an apparently perplexing paradox: On the one hand, Canadians have a higher propensity to save then Americans. But on the other hand, Canadians have more savings than Americans. A tough one, I know.

In the Globe's words,

"The difference here is not huge, but it is consistent and significant. For example, Canadians and American consumers are four percentage points apart when asked whether they intend to spend less in 2009; in Canada, 62 per cent said yes, as against 58 per cent in the United States. Other questions yielded similar answers.

The contrast is striking not only in the light of the comparative health of the Canadian economy as a whole. When, more specifically, the economic conditions of households in these two North American countries are considered, levels of debt and net worth are more favourable in Canada than in the U.S., which means that Canadians are paradoxically better able to spend, but less willing to do so."

It's a puzzler all right, we might need to invent another branch of mathematics to solve this one*.

This is part an editorial where the Globe chides Canadians for not doing their rock and rollpatriotic duty by taking on more debt and spending more money in order to keep the economy growing.

Says H & Mthe Globe,

"Canadians should spend wisely, but spend nonetheless. They might reasonably cut back on some immediate pleasures, but they should think seriously about taking advantage of lower or stable price levels. Pleasure may be compatible, however, with quality and durability; consider women's clothing, for example, the prices for which fell in 2008 in Canada."

I'd respond but someone has already said all that needs to be said in the comments,

"Wait a minute ... Americans basically CAUSED this worldwide problem by being too willing to spend more money than they had, getting into unsustainable levels of debt, and now it's a problem that Canadians are more cautious in their spending than the most reckless consumers on the planet?

Nuh-uh."

On a final note, is it too early to nominate 'paradox' as one of the most overused words for 2009? It's been a perfect storm of paradox references in my recent reading.

---
* It took the development of calculus to solve many of the paradoxes posed by Zeno in ancient Greece.

Media Failure #3

OK, last bit of media-bashing for a while, Vancouver Condo Info reminds of this article from the CBC on the Vancouver Housing Market. Of course there are any number of articles like this one, but this one stands out for its timing (it was published right at the top of the market) and the lack of any balance to the bullish predictions.

Says the CBC, "

B.C. house prices forecast to keep rising: Anyone looking for a dip in the British Columbia real estate market before buying a home might reconsider their strategy.

A report by the Credit Union Central of British Columbia predicts housing prices will continue to rise by as much as 10 per cent this year and as much as seven per cent in 2009.

The report predicts that in 2009 multi-family units such as condos and townhomes could exceed single-family homes in B.C.The report predicts that in 2009 multi-family units such as condos and townhomes could exceed single-family homes in B.C.

Lower mortgage rates, a tight labour market, high income growth and rising in-migration all point to continued high sales volumes and price rises, according the CUCBC's chief economist Helmut Pastrick.

The Economic Analysis of British Columbia released Monday says the current housing boom is unlike previous market cycles that ended with a large oversupply of homes, causing a sharp drop in prices.

In the current market, sales have reached a plateau and the supply of houses is only gradually catching up with demand. And with the recent drop in mortgage rates, the CUCBC expects the number of home sales will pick up once again.

It's almost like they are trying to parody a typical bullish media article from the top of a bubble. There's the classic 'this time is different' reasoning ("the current housing boom is unlike previous market cycles"), there's the reliance on 'experts' who work at institutions with a vested interest in rising prices, the discounting of data that doesn't fit the happy storyline, and so on.

And I can laugh, because I didn't buy a house this year, but anyone who did after reading this article would have to be pretty pissed off since the price of an average detached house in Vancouver has dropped over $100,000 since May. I guess the CBC was right, anyone looking for a dip in the B.C. market *should* have reconsidered their strategy - since far worse than a dip was coming.