Professor Shark posted:

Can't wait for the next numbers to come out and Joe Oliver gets in front of cameras and explains how, weeks leading up to a vote, Canada is experiencing a Special Circumstances Recession* (insert whatever word focus group's better)

Arabian Jesus posted:

Cultural Imperial posted:

Who the gently caress actually works at age 70+

Arabian Jesus posted:

Mystic_Shadow posted:

I want to see a version of this graph extending to 2014.

etalian posted:

The most recent rate I could find was 3.6% for 2014:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/repo...rticle23274104/

Mystic_Shadow posted:

Thank you. Seems weird to me that the global recession several years ago didn't change the savings rate much, but I'm sure there's a good reason for that. Maybe what Mandibular Fiasco said.

HookShot posted:

Hey is there still a canpol thread in D&D or am I just blind af and can't find it?

colonel_korn posted:

It got moved to Election Erection since we have an erection election coming up.

http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3733142

Cultural Imperial posted:

Who the gently caress actually works at age 70+

HookShot posted:

Oh poo poo, new subforum. Thanks!

etalian posted:

Conservative MPs blocked John Oliver from being questioned on whether or not Canada will run a deficit due to the recession.

Professor Shark posted:

really?

EvilJoven posted:

Part of me feels that things are going to be so far gone that saving money now is like spendinf your money on a first class ticket on a sinking boat.

I don't mean like actual complete societal collapse but a more realistic period of insane inflation, bail-ins and other nonsense that will make any amount of money a person can reasonably save these days either worth next to nothing at best or basically confiscated at worst.

EvilJoven posted:

Part of me feels that things are going to be so far gone that saving money now is like spendinf your money on a first class ticket on a sinking boat.

I don't mean like actual complete societal collapse but a more realistic period of insane inflation, bail-ins and other nonsense that will make any amount of money a person can reasonably save these days either worth next to nothing at best or basically confiscated at worst.

etalian posted:

Yup:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/conservative-mps-block-move-to-hear-from-joe-oliver-on-the-economy-1.3170208?cmp=rss

There's been doubt over whether due to weakening economy the budget would run a deficit for 2015/2016. So instead of allowing hearing the conservative ruling party just blocked the process.

Lexicon posted:

I agree with this. For better or worse, that's why I'm ploughing all my spare cash into index funds.

Lexicon posted:

I agree with this. For better or worse, that's why I'm ploughing all my spare cash into index funds.

quote:

Oil slump hits Fort McMurray’s housing market

Fort McMurray’s housing market is weakening, one of the signs of tough times in Alberta’s oil sands.

Real estate prices are slumping, vacancy rates soaring and rents dropping. Lineups are shorter at the airport and coffee shops. Even the local football team is suffering as corporate sponsorships dry up.

The boom seems like a distant memory after crude-oil prices plunged by half over the past year, triggering widespread layoffs in the oil sands. The Wood Buffalo-Cold Lake region’s jobless rate has doubled to 8.2 per cent.

Fort McMurray renter Richard Mayers and his family are now paying $2,700 a month for a four-bedroom home, down from $3,200. It’s a much-needed price break because Mr. Mayers recently was laid off as operations manager at CEDA International Corp., which provides industrial maintenance services for the oil-sands industry.

He has been trying to keep busy, serving as offensive-line coach for the Fort McMurray Monarchs of the Alberta Football League, where many former university players have ended up. Last summer, team members easily landed jobs. But with the economic downturn, 10 players on the 65-man roster were still searching for work in July.

“There were a lot more job opportunities a year ago,” Mr. Mayers said as the amateur squad practised at a high-school field. The Monarchs have felt the chill as a group, with corporate sponsorships totalling $1,200 recently, compared with $22,000 last summer.

Rents have declined this spring and summer as landlords offer discounts in an effort to keep tenants and discourage them from moving to cheaper accommodations.

Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp.’s rental-market survey for the Wood Buffalo region, which is dominated by Fort McMurray, shows a sharp rise in empty apartment units. The vacancy rate in April for one-bedroom units in Wood Buffalo jumped to 21 per cent, compared with 5.8 per cent a year earlier. One-bedroom rents averaged $1,574 in April, down 8.2 per cent from $1,715 in the same month in 2014, CMHC’s survey shows.

The local resale housing sector is also looking wobbly as some owners begin feeling the economic pinch. In the Wood Buffalo area, the price of all types of properties sold on the Multiple Listing Service will average $544,000 this year, down 9 per cent from $597,626 last year, according to a forecast by CMHC.

Listings for detached houses are up while sales are down in a buyer’s market.

There are fewer travellers at the airport, which opened a new terminal in mid-2014. Fort McMurray International Airport handled 569,633 commercial and charter passengers in the first half of this year, down 11.8 per cent from the same period last year.

In the three months ended June 30, the airport saw a sharp decline in charters as energy companies cancelled flying contracts. The number of charter passengers going through the airport tumbled to 33,901 people in the second quarter, down 47.1 per cent from the same period last year, said AltaCorp Capital Inc. analyst Chris Murray.

Tony LeBlanc, a skilled tradesman who has found steady work at Syncrude Canada Ltd., remembers paying $1,200 a month for his portion of the rent in a two-bedroom basement suite that he shared when he arrived in Fort McMurray in early 2013. That same year, he moved to a mobile home, where he now pays $750 a month for accommodation that he shares with two roommates.

“Whether or not my job is safe from the downside of the economy and the price of oil, your guess is as good as anybody’s,” Mr. LeBlanc said.

He said it used to take 20 minutes or more to get served coffee at one of the community’s three Tim Hortons outlets, and now the wait is closer to 10 minutes. Mr. LeBlanc and his co-workers have noticed fewer cars and trucks along Highway 63 between Fort McMurray and oil-sands plants.

In June, a new football stadium opened in Fort McMurray – a $133-million facility planned long before oil prices plummeted. A regular-season CFL game between the Edmonton Eskimos and Toronto Argonauts attracted an announced crowd of 4,900 fans in a stadium that could have welcomed 15,000 spectators.

During the boom, more workers would have shelled out $109 to get a good seat or more companies would have bought tickets for employees, several fans said.

The Wood Buffalo-Cold Lake region’s unadjusted unemployment rate, based on a three-month moving average, hit 8.2 per cent in June – double the 4.1-per-cent jobless rate in the same month of 2014.

Stephanie Swain, an administrator who has switched her career path to pipe fitting, is thinking about moving back to Nova Scotia with her husband, Paul MacLeod, a veteran pipe fitter. “Things are bad in Fort Mac,” she said, referring to growing unemployment.

In a reversal of fortunes, instead of East Coast workers flocking to Alberta, Irving Shipbuilding Inc. is recruiting employees for its shipyard in Halifax, hoping to lure former Nova Scotians back home.

Irving held a job fair in July in a meeting room at Fort McMurray’s leisure community centre. The gleaming centre, built during the oil boom, features two NHL-sized rinks and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Suncor Energy Inc. has the naming rights for the centre while Syncrude’s name is on the aquatic centre.

“The oil-sands industry is invested in the community,” said Kwame Osei, who coaches football in Fort McMurray at Holy Trinity Catholic High School, which shares entrance doors with its neighbour, the Suncor Energy Centre for the Performing Arts.

Cultural Imperial posted:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/housing/oil-slump-hits-fort-mcmurrays-housing-market/article25814458/




oil prices will be back up to 80 by the second half of the year u guys

quote:

What Jane Jacobs Got Wrong About Cities

Few people have had more influence on thinking about cities than the late Jane Jacobs.

The onetime New Yorker turned Torontonian, Jacobs, who died in 2006, has become something of a patron saint for American urbanists, and the moral and economic case she made for urban revival has been cited by everyone from pundits and think tanks to developers.

However, though widely celebrated for her insights and unabashed embrace of dense urbanism, Jacobs may ultimately prove more influential than relevant. Her writing was often incisive and inspiring, particularly when she opposed planning and overdevelopment and embraced the role of middle-class families in cities. But the urban revival that has actually taken place is at variance with her own romantic version of cities and how they work.

Currently the American cities that are doing best are not those with a flourishing middle class but those have become the preferred playgrounds of the rich and famous—New York, San Francisco, even Washington, D.C. At the same time, vast portions of urban America remain cut off from society’s mainstream.

The Nature of the New Urban Revival

When Jacobs published her most important work, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, in 1961, America’s cities were clearly in trouble. Racial tensions and a massive flight to suburbia were undermining the promise of cities, and the only response of planners at the time seemed to be to expand freeway access, tear down old neighborhoods, construct massive apartment blocks, and subsidize big employers.

Jacobs rightly opposed these approaches, and constructed a far more human and enduring vision of urbanism. Her appealing perspective was based on middle-class neighborhoods, families, and grassroots economic activity. Her maxim about the best role for places remains a guiding light to those who care about upward mobility: “A metropolitan economy, if it is working well, is constantly transforming many poor people into middle-class people, many illiterates into skilled people, many greenhorns into competent citizens. … Cities don’t lure the middle class. They create it.”

Yet when cities did begin to come back—a handful in the ’80s and then again more around the time of the millennium—the revivals were in many ways the opposite of her grassroots vision. Instead of creating more family-oriented middle-class neighborhoods, the urban revival ended up being based on “luring” the affluent, the still forming young person, or the accomplished, childless professional than generating a new middle class.

Witold Rybczynski noted in 2010 that the rise of successful urban cores increasingly has little in common with Jacobs’s romantic bottom-up organic urbanism:

“The most successful urban neighborhoods have attracted not the blue-collar families that she celebrated, but the rich and the young. The urban vitality that she espoused—and correctly saw as a barometer of healthy city life—has found new expressions in planned commercial and residential developments whose scale rivals that of the urban renewal of which she was so critical. These developments are the work of real estate entrepreneurs, who were absent from the city described … but loom large today, having long ago replaced planners and our chief urban strategists.”

There is a reason why 70 to 80 percent of Americans in our metropolitan areas live in suburbs.
As Rybczynski suggests, the current rise of “urban vitality” derives not from the idiosyncratic, diverse and, if you will, democratic form that Jacobs celebrated but in a more manufactured matter that at times outdoes suburbs for conformity and boredom.

The Evisceration of the Urban Middle Class

Jacobs’s vision failed in large part because today’s cities play a different economic role than they did in the past. The economic basis of her New York—small businesses, manufacturers, business service firms employing masses of middle-class workers—has declined while the city has evolved into what Jean Gottman called the “transactional metropolis,” dependent on the most elite financial services, high-end consumption, and the all too present media industry.

This urban economy has many strengths but increasingly relies on the rich. A Citigroup study suggested that cities, particularly New York and London, have become “plutonomies”—economies driven largely by the wealthy class’s investment and spending. In this way the playground or luxury cores serve less as places of aspiration than geographies of inequality.

New York, for example, is by some measurements the most unequal of American major cities: Gotham’s 1 percent earns a third of the entire city’s personal income—almost twice the proportion for the rest of the country.

Other luxury cores exhibit similar patterns. A 2014 recent Brookings report found that virtually all the most unequal large central cities—with the exception of Atlanta and Miami—are dense, luxury-oriented cities such as San Francisco, Boston, Washington, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. Although high-wage jobs have increased in these metropolises, the bulk of new employment in cities like New York has been in low-wage service jobs.

As urban studies author Stephen J.K. Walters notes, these cities tend to develop highly bifurcated economies, divided between an elite sector and large service class. He writes this is “the opposite of [Jane] Jacobs’s vision of cities” that relied on “transforming” poor people into the middle-class people

Even diversity, often cited by Jacobs as a great asset of cities, has suffered. Among the most successful cities today are what analyst Aaron Renn has labeled “the white cities”—places like Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland, Oregon—which have historically been home to relatively small and now shrinking, minority populations. San Francisco’s black population is 35 percent lower than what it was in 1970. In the nation’s whitest major city, Portland, African-Americans are being driven out of the urban core by gentrification, partly supported by city funding. Similar phenomena can be seen in Seattle and Boston, where long existing black communities are rapidly shrinking.

In the more diverse big cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago, gentrification takes place alongside growing concentrations of poverty. It is often forgotten, according to demographer Wendell Cox, that 80 percent of the increase in urban core population in the last decade was from poor people; overall, despite the growth of poverty in suburbs, the core poverty rate remains more than twice as high.

Nor is this situation necessarily improving. During the first 10 years of the new millennium, neighborhoods with entrenched urban poverty actually grew, increasing in numbers from 1,100 to 3,100 and in population from 2 million to 4 million. “This growing concentration of poverty,” note urban researchers Joe Cortright and Dillon Mahmoudi (PDF), “is the biggest problem confronting American cities.”

We see this in places like Brooklyn and Chicago, two much-hyped epicenters of urban gentrification. Brooklyn’s poorer sections—a quarter of the residents are on food stamps—have become even more so, notes analyst Daniel Hertz. Incomes between 1999 and 2001, he notes, dropped overall, falling in the poorer areas even as they soared in the more gentrified neighborhood closer to Manhattan and surrounding Prospect Park.

Hertz found similar, if more extreme, phenomena in Chicago, which has also seen an unwelcome return to high crime rates, particularly in its poorer sections. Gentrification has indeed expanded into formerly working- and middle-class neighborhoods, but poverty and despair still characterize much of the city. As Chicago urban analyst Pete Saunders has put it: “Chicago may be better understood in thirds—one-third San Francisco, two-thirds Detroit.”

Here Comes the Childless City

Arguably Jacobs’s biggest miscalculation related to urban demographics. As H.G. Wells predicted well over a century ago, cities now depend in large part on affluent, childless people, living what Wells labeled a life of “luxurious extinction.” Jacobs’s contemporary, the great sociologist Herbert Gans, already identified a vast chasm between suburbanites and those who favor urban core living who he identified as “the rich, the poor, the non-white as well as the unmarried and childless middle class.”

Jacobs never got this point, perhaps because she instinctively hated where families were in fact headed: the suburbs. Like many intellectuals in the ’50s and ’60s, she saw no need for suburbs, even as they experienced explosive growth, just dense city surrounded by traditional countryside.

Perhaps nothing of Jacobs seems more dated than her assertion that “suburbs must be a difficult place to raise children.” She lovingly portrayed neighborhoods like her own West Village as ideal places where locals watched out for each other. She wrote about how “Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, bawls out one of my sons for running into the street, and then later reports the transgression to my husband as he passes the locksmith shop. Mr. Lacey, with whom we have no ties other than street propinquity, feels responsible for him to a degree.”

At best, Jacobs’s compelling portrait from 1961 is something of an anachronism. Families in urban apartments today, notes Cornell researcher Gary Evans (PDF), generally have far weaker networks of neighbors than their suburban counterparts, a generally more stressful home life, and significantly less “social support.” Toronto author Phillip Preville notes, “In the years since, all the Mr. Laceys of the world have died and gone to downtown heaven,” he notes. “We can all talk Jane’s talk, but some people are pickled in Jane’s brine.”

Certainly statistics back up Preville’s assertion. Greenwich Village today now largely consists of students, wealthy people, and pensioners. Despite the presence of many young people, children and teens between 5 and 17 account for only 6 percent of the Village’s population, far below the norms for New York City (PDF), and less than half the 13.1 percent found across the United States’s 52 largest metropolitan areas. Overall, Manhattan has among the lowest percentage of children in the country; a majority of its households are made up of singles.

This pattern holds across the country. According to census data, in 2011 children 5-14 constitute about 7 percent in core districts across the country, roughly half the level seen in suburbs and exurbs. By 2011 people in their 20s constitute roughly one-quarter of the residents in urban cores, but only 14 percent or fewer of those who live in suburbs, where the bulk of people go as they start to reach the point of establishing families.

Even in Toronto, generally seen as one of the world’s most livable cities and Jacobs’s chosen home, Statistics Canada notes that for every person who moved from the hinterlands to the city, 3.5 moved towards the periphery. The people most likely to move out are 25 to 44, people entering the stage of family formation. As one Torontonian, who recently moved to the suburbs, observed: “The big city has its uses. It served me well, and I served it back. Living in Toronto enabled me to transform my life in ways I dearly wanted: marriage, fatherhood, career advancement. That transformation has brought with it needs that Toronto cannot adequately provide: personal space, affordability, an emphasis on community over privacy. The intensity and the anonymity of the city now hinder my life more than they help. Simple as that. I’m outta here.”

Overall, high-density cores, whether in Canada, America, or East Asia, consistently exhibit the lowest percentages of children. The far more ultra-dense cities of East Asia—Hong Kong, Singapore, and Seoul—exhibit the lowest fertility rates on the planet (PDF), sometimes less than half the number required simply to replace the current population. Due largely to crowding and high housing prices, 45 percent of couples in Hong Kong say they have given up on having children.

In Asia people have few opportunities to move to lower-density housing. But in the United States, with abundant and often much cheaper land, super-urbanity often serves as a kind of way station in which people spend only a portion—often an exciting and career-enhancing one—of their lives. But when they grow older, and particularly when they decide to start families, they tend to leave for the periphery.

Getting Beyond Nostalgia

Nostalgia makes people feel good. Some still dream about a coming revival of diverse, child-friendly, dense city neighborhoods. They dream, in the words of one author, of bringing us “back to the way we were, when most people lived in cities, did not own a car, walked or took the bus or train to work, and lived in much smaller residences.”

Wishing to return to something that last predominated a half-century ago does not mean it will occur. Just as conservatives who hearken for a return to the ’50s are sure to be disappointed, urban advocates who suggest a “return to the city” for middle-class families will be as well. Both minorities and millennials, often thought of as spearheading a “back to the city” drive, are, according to most indicators, moving out to the suburbs as they enter their 30s and start families.

Dense urbanity, of course, remains a huge contributor to the nation’s economy and culture. Urban centers are great places for the talented, the young, and childless affluent adults. But for most Americans, the central city offers at best a temporary lifestyle. It does not fit with what people can afford and where they want to live. There is a reason why 70 to 80 percent of Americans in our metropolitan areas live in suburbs, and those numbers are not likely to change appreciably in the coming decade.

Cities, as Jacobs hoped, have indeed experienced a renaissance, but not in the form she preferred. To be sure, this revival is a hell of lot better than the urban dystopia that developed in the years after Jacobs’s Death and Life of Great American Cities first appeared. But it’s time to recognize that we are not seeing a renaissance of the kind of middle-class urbanity that she loved and championed. That city has passed into myth, and, unless society changes in very radical ways, it is never going to come back.

quote:

Liar Loans Pop up in Canada’s Magnificent Housing Bubble

For a long time, the conservative mortgage lending standards in Canada, including a slew of new ones since 2008, have been touted as one of the reasons why Canada’s magnificent housing bubble, when it implodes, will not take down the financial system, unlike the US housing bubble, which terminated in the Financial Crisis.

Canada is different. Regulators are on top of it. There are strict down payment requirements. Mortgages are full-recourse, so strung-out borrowers couldn’t just mail in their keys and walk away, as they did in the US. And yada-yada-yada.

But Wednesday afterhours, Home Capital Group, Canada’s largest non-bank mortgage lender, threw a monkey wrench into this theory.

Through its subsidiary, Home Trust, the company focuses on “alternative” mortgages: high-profit mortgages to risky borrowers with dented credit or unreliable incomes who don’t qualify for mortgage insurance and were turned down by the banks. They include subprime borrowers.

So it disclosed, upon the urging of the Ontario Securities Commission, the results of an investigation that had been going on secretly since September: “falsification of income information.” Liar loans.

Liar loans had been the scourge of the US housing bust. Lenders were either actively involved or blissfully closed their eyes. And everyone made a ton of money.

So Home Capital revealed that it has suspended “during the period of September 2014 to March 2015, its relationship with 18 independent mortgage brokers and 2 brokerages, for a total of approximately 45 individual mortgage brokers,” who’d together originated nearly C$1 billion in single-family residential mortgages in 2014. That’s 5.3% of the company’s total outstanding loan assets, and 12.5% of its total single-family mortgage originations in 2014.

That’s a big chunk. The company, however, didn’t disclose why it took so long to disclose this.

It said an “external source” had warned it about income falsification on mortgage applications submitted by a number of brokers. Its investigation did not find any evidence of falsified credit scores or property values, it said.

It’s not hard for a lender to require income verification. Not requiring it is precisely what US lenders had done before the Financial Crisis. Add a little encouragement from a broker, and that’s how you get perfect liar loans.

Home Capital had already announced on July 10 (Friday afterhours!) that in Q2, originations of high-margin uninsured mortgages had plunged 16% and originations of lower-margin insured single-family mortgages had plummeted 55% because it had axed some brokers. Its shares plunged 20% the following Monday and another 4% the next day [read… Largest “Alternative” Mortgage Lender in Canada Plunges, Denies “Systemic Problem” in Housing Market].

At the time, HCG was the fourth most shorted stock in Canada. By July 29, the day before the current announcement, HCG had risen to the second most shorted stock. Today, massive short-covering set in, and shares soared 13%, but remain 42% below where they’d been during the halcyon days last November.

“Everyone had their ideas about what transpired in the past six months; this corroborates some suspicions but dispels some others,” Shubha Khan, an analyst at National Bank Financial told the Financial Post, adding – with Canadian understatement – that there were “still some questions.”

Among them, whether these insured liar loans would continue to be insured; and whether this was an isolated problem, rather than an industry issue in the Canadian housing market. In other words, is it just the tip of the iceberg?

Housing bubbles are money generators. Temptations are huge. Falsifying mortgage applications is easy if no one checks them. It’s a mad scramble to extract as much money as possible for as long as possible – but with a devastating aftermath.

Now liar loans are coming out of the Canadian woodwork. The much touted down-payment requirements in Canada have already fallen apart. Don’t have the money for even 5% down? Solutions are openly promoted, for example:

It is not a problem anymore!!! Canada Mortgage & Financial Group (CMFG) has a new product that now allows you to borrow your down payment from any source…. The only amount you need to show on your own is 1.5% of the purchase price….

With regulators breathing softly down their necks, banks might have become more careful in lending to people to buy homes that are among the most overpriced in the world. What has that accomplished? The rise of alternative lenders in the shadow banking system. They’re not subject to the same regulations as banks.

“There’s a lot more that can be hidden from the public, things that are not right could not be noticed early on,” Michael Dolega, a senior economist at TD Economics, told the Huffington Post of Canada. “The quality is slipping, and it’s far more questionable for some of these smaller lenders, but at the same time I think it’s still better than it was in the U.S., when it went south pretty quickly.”

Yes, this time it’s different.

But the patterns are crystallizing: Home Capital Group with liar loans on its books, CMFG with ultra-low down-payment loans on its books…. In banking, bad deals are made in good times.

Even the Bank of Canada, in its most recent Financial System Review in June, fretted over the risks in the shadow banking system due to its “less regulated nature” and outright “opacity,” and considered it a “particularly important vulnerability” to financial stability. While the sector is still relatively small, it would impact the overall economy, it said.

But it’s not so small anymore – estimated at 10% of Canada’s mortgage market and growing rapidly: A report by CIBC (Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce), cited by the Huffington Post, found that lending by alternative lenders had doubled since 2012, and as of the Q3 last year, was still growing 20% year-over-year.

This comes at the worst possible time for Canada. The economy likely shrank in the first half. Hence, the Conference Board of Canada just downgraded growth to 1.6% in 2015, worst since 2009. It sees some deep problems, after a 15.5% plunge in business investment in Q1:

Oil and gas firms are expected to chop their investment by almost one-third…. Outside the energy sector, firms remain hesitant to invest. Purchases of machinery and equipment suffered a substantial decline in the first quarter of the year, and a decline in building permits suggests a downturn in commercial construction in 2015. Overall, business investment will drop by close to 7% this year.

Household spending is also expected to weaken, despite savings for consumers at the gas pump and federal tax cuts. Soft employment growth, weak wage gains, high level of household debt and job losses in oil producing provinces will combine to limit growth in consumer spending to 2.1% in 2015.

That would be the optimistic scenario. It assumes that the magnificent housing bubble can be maintained; but all bets are off if it takes liar loans, among other underwriting schemes, to maintain it. And when the housing bubble deflates, all these schemes that are forgiven as long as prices rise will turn into an unappetizing mess.

The problems are already spreading in the Canadian real estate sector. Read… Epic Glut of Office Space Crushes Hope in Canadian Oil Patch

quote:

5 signs of trouble for Saskatchewan's economy in oil slump

When crude oil prices began to plummet, economists comforted Saskatchewan residents that their diversified economy would safeguard them during the oil and gas slump.

In fact, Saskatchewan's economy isn't that diverse.

The province relies heavily on natural resources: fuel, food and fertilizer.

The Canadian Association of Oil Drilling Contractors forecasts it will drill half as many wells in 2015 compared to 2014.

And while economists were banking on the agriculture and potash industries to offset energy losses, they're no longer confident that will happen.

The potash industry remains strong in production, on par with its growth last year, but nitrogen prices have fallen about $60 US a tonne.

Most worrisome, it's shaping up to be a disappointing crop year for many Saskatchewan farmers, thanks to an unwelcome mixture of spring frost, drought and poorly timed rains.

While cattle prices remain high, drought has jeopardized hay yields and could force some ranchers to sell off their herd.

The Bank of Montreal has already downgraded its growth projection for Saskatchewan this year from one per cent to half a per cent.

"It's disappointing," chief economist at the Bank of Montreal, Douglas Porter, said. "The likelihood of a pretty tough crop this year further dims the outlook for western Canada."

The Royal Bank of Canada told CBC News it expects to downgrade its growth projection next month as well.

Premier Brad Wall says he's still confident the province can overcome economic pressures, and points to his government's four-year plan to spend $5.8 billion on infrastructure.

Still, there are already red flags for the economy. Here are five signs of trouble:

1. Housing sales

The honeymoon is over for Saskatchewan's housing boom.

The Canadian Real Estate Association predicts house sales in Saskatchewan will decline by nearly 13 per cent this year.

That's both an indicator of low consumer confidence and an ominous sign for the construction industry.

Housing starts in the first quarter of 2015 are half what they were three years ago.

There's already a glut of houses for sale in Regina and they're overvalued, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation.

2. Retail sales

Saskatchewan was the worst performer in the country for retail sales, declining by 2.6 per cent in the past year, according to the National Bank of Canada.

In May 2015, when every other province saw their retail sales rebound slightly, only Saskatchewan experienced another drop.

3. Manufacturing

Thirty-five hundred people have lost manufacturing jobs in Saskatchewan over the past year.

In a relatively small sector, that's a significant job loss — more than 10 per cent.

A welder at Brent Gedak Welding in Estevan still had his job in March 2015, although jobs related to the oil patch were already drying up. (Bonnie Allen/CBC)

Saskatchewan manufacturers cater mostly to domestic customers in the oil, agriculture and potash industries. However, economists had hoped that the weak Canadian dollar and strong U.S. economy would boost export demand.

"We've generally been disappointed in terms of the numbers through the first half of the year," Paul Ferley, assistant chief economist at the Royal Bank of Canada, said.

Even the potash industry isn't fuelling sales, as several mining companies are winding down capital projects and phasing into mine maintenance.

"The sky isn't falling," executive director of Saskatchewan Manufacturing Council, Derek Lothian, said.

While he's worried a poor crop year will hurt farm equipment sales, Lothian points out that province's manufacturing industry has grown exponentially over the past decade.

4. Unemployment rate

The provincial government continues to boast that Saskatchewan has the lowest unemployment rate of any province in Canada.

Yet, Saskatchewan's unemployment rate was 4.7 per cent in June 2015, up from 3.7 per cent a year ago.

The chief economist for Bank of Montreal points out that's not good.

"The unemployment rate is up about a percentage point since the end of 2014 and that's a relatively steep climb for the province, given that nationally we've only seen unemployment go up a few tenths of a percent," Porter said.

5. Vacancy rate

Cities that cater to the oilpatch have "Apartment For Rent" signs everywhere.

The apartment vacancy rate in Estevan, Sask., has spiked to 20 per cent. (CBC)

The apartment vacancy rate in Estevan has spiked to 20 per cent, and vacancies in Lloydminster and Weyburn have increased fourfold to 11.6 and 8 per cent, respectively.

While a glut of new condos has contributed to this, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation also attributes the changing rental market to fewer migrants.

That is a worrisome trend, according to Rose Olfert, public policy analyst at the Johnson-Shoyama Graduate School in Saskatoon.

"The rapidly growing economy was pulling in more and more people. The reversal of that will be an indication that the economy is slowing down and people leaving the province."

Cultural Imperial posted:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/01/what-jane-jacobs-got-wrong-about-cities.html

quote:

Perhaps nothing of Jacobs seems more dated than her assertion that “suburbs must be a difficult place to raise children.” She lovingly portrayed neighborhoods like her own West Village as ideal places where locals watched out for each other. She wrote about how “Mr. Lacey, the locksmith, bawls out one of my sons for running into the street, and then later reports the transgression to my husband as he passes the locksmith shop. Mr. Lacey, with whom we have no ties other than street propinquity, feels responsible for him to a degree.”

At best, Jacobs’s compelling portrait from 1961 is something of an anachronism. Families in urban apartments today, notes Cornell researcher Gary Evans (PDF), generally have far weaker networks of neighbors than their suburban counterparts, a generally more stressful home life, and significantly less “social support.” Toronto author Phillip Preville notes, “In the years since, all the Mr. Laceys of the world have died and gone to downtown heaven,” he notes. “We can all talk Jane’s talk, but some people are pickled in Jane’s brine.”

Rime posted:

See now, I was sitting here mulling my employment prospects when a fell chill ran down my spine upon realizing the magnitude of Albertas coming hell:

Sure, we can all laugh and rub our hands with glee, but the fact is that (as much as we may wish to imagine otherwise) the provinces aren't countries and have free movement. So all these heavily indebted rig pigs are going to bring their filthy unemployed asses to BC (or back east, or wherever they came from) and drag us even further down here with their dead weight.

Of course reading that loan article gives me the gut feeling the county itself has finally peaked and our economy is about to relive the 1980s/90s in a very nasty way no matter where you are...

quote:

WTI prices were sliding again on Monday:

And we’re probably going lower due to a glut of Saudi and Middle Eastern crude entering the market.


Here’s the latest from JBC Energy:

Total OPEC crude production remained at elevated levels in July as Middle Eastern heavyweights such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq continue to pump near record levels. According to our SuDeP assessment, July production stayed largely on par with our revised June figures at 31.4 million b/d. That is about 1.1 million b/d more than in the same month last year, with Saudi Arabia and Iraq contributing the most to y-o-y growth (see chart).

Iraq output in July was seen increasing further by some 50,000 b/d m-o-m to a new record high of 4.15 million b/d. Reportedly, exports from the South averaged over 3.05 million b/d in the first 3 weeks of July. The introduction of the new Basrah Heavy grade is helping overcome infrastructure constraints and producers have been able to ramp up production which had been held back before. On top of this, additional output is coming from Gazprom Neft’s Badra field for example , as a new well came online with some 10,000 b/d as of mid-July.

Also worth putting into the mix are reports (from fringe media) of Opec nations shorting the oil market directly, with the Kuwait Investment Authority and Saudi Arabia’s SWF SAMA cited specifically.

What to make of this?

Well, first, it’s not unheard of for these institutions to short. It’s also necessary to differentiate from outright shorting and curve plays, which exploit spread differentials. Going short the paper market for a producer can simply mean hedging, a.k.a selling oil forward because you can get a better price for selling tomorrow’s oil than today’s.

Selling forward AND selling physical? Well, that arguably puts a producer entity in a coordinated strategic assault position. Why? Because it naturally suppresses the contango which would otherwise emerge on the back of mass oil dumping in the spot market.

If there’s no super-contango, there’s less of an incentive for opportunists to buy and store oil in ways that balances the market and keeps shale and non opec producers in business.

Indeed, it’s only by constraining the contango effect that Opec can be sure that prices can go as low as they need to go to get rid of the competition.

As John Kemp from Reuters noted Monday:

Saudi Arabia appears to be calculating low prices will encourage enough demand growth while restraining non-OPEC non-shale production, enabling the market to absorb resumed Iranian exports in 2016 without having to cut Saudi Arabia’s own production.

Something, we’d say, is mainly worrying for the likes of non-shale non Opec producers like Russia.

To wit, compare and contrast the following:

Cultural Imperial posted:

You really gotta hand it to these loving saudi motherfuckers.

ps eat poo poo for the next 10 years alberta

Hal_2005 posted:

If no, what is the core topic that needs to be addressed before the Oct vote to get the avg. goon motivated to volunteer/vote?