ALWAYS CONSULT YOUR INVESTMENT PROFESSIONAL BEFORE MAKING ANY INVESTMENT DECISION
November 5, 2024 | Health Prepping: A Legit Anti-Cancer Diet?
There are a million diets out there, most of which are simply common sense combined with one marketable hook (grapefruit, red meat, etc). But one — the Ketogenic diet — just got some intriguing scientific backing. From today’s Epoch Times: Researchers Discover New Mechanism Linking Diet and Cancer Risk Epoch Times, November 3, 2024 MGO, a glucose […]
November 5, 2024 | Home Listings Rise as Pandemic-Era Mortgages Approach Renewal
A new CMHC report notes that 1.2 million mortgages are up for renewal in 2025 and 980,000 in 2026. About 85% have fixed rates contracted when mortgage rates were below 2% compared with over 4% today. Although the Bank of Canada has lowered its base rate from 5 to 3.75% since June, Canadian fixed-term loan […]
November 4, 2024 | Recession Watch: Interest Rates Spike, Warren Buffett Sells
Higher For Longer (than expected) When the Fed started cutting interest rates in September, the assumption was that rates would fall and the Fed would maintain the downward trajectory well into 2025. But interest rates didn’t cooperate. Across the yield curve, days like this one (November 2) have become the norm. A rising 10-year […]
November 4, 2024 | Pigs at the Trough
Happy Monday Morning! We do our best to steer clear of politics in this newsletter. However, housing is political. Housing is impacted by all levels of government, from the federal government at the top, the provincial government in the middle, and all the way down to your municipal council member. Our housing crisis is largely […]
November 4, 2024 | Our Fragile Infrastructure: Lessons From Hurricane Helene
Asheville, North Carolina is known for its historic architecture, vibrant arts scene and as a gateway to the Blue Ridge Mountains. It was a favorite escape for “climate migrants” moving from California, Arizona, and other climate-challenged vicinities, until a “500 year flood” ravaged the city this fall. Hurricane Helene was a wakeup call not just […]
November 3, 2024 | Home Sales Reach 14-Year Low in the US
The home buying frenzy seen during the pandemic years has ended. We are no longer in a seller’s market as the tides have shifted. The National Association of Realtors reported that home sales in the US slowed to a 14-year low this September. Sales declined 3.5% on an annual basis. Existing homes declined 1% on a […]
November 3, 2024 | A Canny Silver Bull Trades Ingots for T-Bonds
[The author of this week’s commentary is an old friend who worked his way up from exchange-floor clerk to commercial real estate mogul over the time I’ve known him. He has demonstrated remarkable timing, courage and patience as an investor, buying commercial real estate at the bottom of the 2007-08 crash and holding it until […]
November 3, 2024 | One-Way Road to Crisis
Anyone else ready for the election to be over? This uncertainty is exhausting, no matter how you want it to end. But sadly, it won’t really end. We will just transition to a different uncertainty over what will happen next. I will offer my thoughts on the election at the end of this letter, after […]
November 2, 2024 | Trading Desk Notes for November 2, 2024
Bond yields have risen sharply since the Fed cut short rates on September 18. When the Fed cut rates in September, the 10-year yield was ~3.6%, an 18-month low. It was ~80 bps higher at 4.4% at Friday’s close. In October 2023, the yield was ~5%, a 16-year high. In this daily chart of the 10-year […]
November 2, 2024 | Trump Wins, Eliminates Federal Income Tax, Economy Booms – This is Important
Link to Interview. This was the Tax Reform Proposal for Congress in 1996. It set the stage for the abolishment of the Income Tax, the introduction of the Consumption Tax, and the restoration of the tax system prior to Marxism. The proposal in its entirety is provided here in PDF format, Parts 1 to […]
November 2, 2024 | Becoming Invisible, Part 15: Don’t Let Roomba See You Hide Your Gold
Yes, your new car tracks your location and records your conversations. Your smart speaker listens to and records your conversations. Your TV watches you while you watch it. Virtually every new device we install in our increasingly high-tech homes collects data and (at least potentially) sends it to criminals, corporations, and/or governments to use however they like. […]
November 2, 2024 | Tech Talk for Saturday November 2nd 2024
The Bottom Line Focus this week is on results from the U.S. election on November 5th. Consensus calls for a “dead heat” for election of the President and the House of Representative and a narrow win by the Republicans for the Senate. Chances are high that final results will not be determined this week. Multiple […]
November 1, 2024 | Britain in An Unprecedented Economic Decline into 2026
Aside from the collapse in Starmer’s popularity, he has confirmed our forecast for Britain. The left never saw someone they did not want to shake down for money. In the US, we have Trump talking about eliminating the income tax, which I worked on during the Nineties and even testified on taxation before the […]
November 1, 2024 | The Great Mortgage Reset in Canada will Hit Hard
Canadian policy makers are worried about potential weakness in the economy due to higher interest rates. One of the biggest challenges facing Canadians is the increase in monthly payments that comes with higher rates. Although there have been four Bank of Canada rate cuts this year, mortgage rates have not come down as much as […]
October 31, 2024 | Will the Next Pandemic Come Before World War III?
The US, Mexico, and Canada are developing a cohesive framework to prepare for the next pandemic. The North American Preparedness for Animal and Human Pandemics Initiative (NAPAHPI) “recognizes that the high degree of interconnectedness among our three countries of our critical infrastructure, supply chains, and societies means that disruptions affecting one country often impact the others.” […]
October 31, 2024 | Fourth Turning Election Igniting A Firestorm
“Imagine some national (and probably global) volcanic eruption, initially flowing along channels of distress that were created during the Unraveling era and further widened by the catalyst. Trying to foresee where the eruption will go once it bursts free of the channels is like trying to predict the exact fault line of an earthquake. All […]
October 30, 2024 | What’s The Right Amount To Bet at a Casino?
During the financial mania of 1634 to 1637, people bid up the price of tulip bulbs. At peak craziness, a “Semper Augustus” bulb sold for the equivalent value of a $14,000,000 mansion on the Amsterdam Grand Canal today. Then the fever broke, dragging bulbs and participants’ net worth back into the dirt. Today’s financial mania […]
October 30, 2024 | Trump’s Former Advisors Discuss How He Could End Ukraine War
Donald Trump has long stated that he would end the war in Ukraine if elected president. Confident in his ability to do so, the former president has stated he could end the conflict in 24 hours, and has guaranteed to do so before he actually enters the White House. He finally revealed how he […]
October 29, 2024 | Japan Providing Ukraine $3B in Stolen Russian Assets
Japan announced one of its largest aid packages to Ukraine to the tune of $3.09 billion (471.9 billion yen). The fund is merely part of the G7 scheme to use frozen Russian assets to finance the war. In total, the G7 is prepared to redistribute $50 billion in Russian assets to Ukraine. This plan will […]
October 29, 2024 | Art of the Collapse, November 2024
It’s official: Deepfakes have made it impossible to trust anything we see online: This is epic! pic.twitter.com/pCbVOcHXvQ — Dr. Clown, PhD (@DrClownPhD) October 24, 2024 Meanwhile, there’s an election where both sides expect to be robbed: Dad Decides It’s Time To Have ‘The Talk’ With Son About Rigged Elections (Babylon Bee) – Local dad Dave […]
October 28, 2024 | Rosenberg: Household Wealth at Extreme Risk
David Rosenberg, founder and president of Rosenberg Research & Associates Inc., joins Jack Farley on Monetary Matters to argue why a recession is likely to occur as soon as 2025. Rosenberg points to the low savings rate and argues that fiscal deficits and a stock market price bubble are boosting consumer spending and that this […]
October 28, 2024 | Heading to Zero
Happy Monday Morning! As expected, Macklem and Co slashed rates by 50bps this past week, citing slower growth and a softening labour market. Further adding, “if the economy evolves broadly in line with our latest forecast, we expect to reduce the policy rate further.” Remember that line, we’ll come back to it. So the Bank […]
October 28, 2024 | Broken China
Here in the US, people are obsessed with the impending election. It is perhaps the World’s Largest Guessing Game. We can look at polls and make our best guesses, but no one really knows what will happen. We just have to wait for more data which will (hopefully) be forthcoming November 5 or soon afterward. […]
October 27, 2024 | Is NATO Prepared for a Trump Victory?
People believe that NATO will simply back down if Donald Trump is re-elected as he is strongly against the war in Ukraine. This is simply not the case as NATO began planning for a Trump victory months ago. Chief Jens Stoltenberg attempted to created a 100 billion euro fund that was intended to be “Trump-proof” […]
October 27, 2024 | An Election Week Scenario
You can always tell when portfolio managers are hard at play, immersed in an epic circle jerk that has become more tediously familiar with each passing week. And so it went on Friday, as money migrated for no discernible reason from certain, temporarily disfavored stocks to flavor-of-the-day hotties. It seemed almost as though the chimpanzees […]