Femtosecond posted:

In general though I agree with the assessment that the tech industry is mostly a lot of US firms taking advantage of cheap labour.

Subjunctive posted:

Wait, you think it's a majority?

quote:

Covered bonds: the European link to Canada’s house price boom

Canadian banks have turned to Europe’s covered bond market for mortgage funding

Last summer, Canadian authorities in Vancouver became so concerned about the flows of Chinese money into their housing market that they introduced a new tax on foreign buyers.

The 15 per cent charge was designed to cool a property sector where prices have spiralled in recent years, and was followed this year by a similar measure in Toronto.

The Canadian housing market is often cast as a story typical of the global economy since the financial crisis: rock bottom interest rates, cheap credit and an ongoing rise in Chinese wealth have pushed property prices sharply higher — in Toronto they have more than doubled since their post-crisis lows in April 2009.

There is, however, another, less commonly discussed flow of European money into the Canadian market — one that operates through the obscure machinery of bank lending, subtly linking homes in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal to officials in Frankfurt.

First fashioned in 18th century Prussia, covered bonds are at the heart of European finance. The instruments, regarded as ultra-safe, are issued by banks to investors to fund mortgage lending. The debt is then secured against the mortgages, providing bondholders with extra security in the event of a default.



Covered bonds never took off in the US, but Canada is different. In June 2012, the government brought in “dedicated covered bond” legislation, providing a legal framework for its biggest banks to tap the market.

At that time, when Mark Carney presided over Canada’s central bank, the European Central Bank was already buying covered bonds to support the continent’s banking sector. By late 2014, when the ECB was making further purchases of the bonds to mark the beginning of its “quantitative easing” measures, the dynamics in Europe were even more favourable for Canadian issuers.

Canadian banks also sell in dollars, but they have flocked to Europe in particular, where there is now about €55bn of Canadian covered bonds outstanding, according to Citi data — a chunk of the nearly €900bn of benchmark covered bonds in the currency.

The ECB does not buy Canadian covered bonds, but it owns more than a third of the entire European market, encouraging investors towards the higher yields available from Canadian issuers.

“What’s the alternative for euro covered bond investors? Should they go into more negative yielding euro area covered bonds which have all been sucked up by the ECB? Or are they going for the alternative markets, which are the Nordics, Canada, Australia . . .?” says Michael Spies, a strategist at Citi.

Concerns over Canadian housing have escalated this year. In May, shares in non-bank lender Home Capital collapsed, and house prices in Toronto dropped following moves by the regional authorities to cool the market.

Analysts say that the Home Capital incident made some investors nervous, but yields on Canadian covered bonds have not moved dramatically.

“Most investors are aware that the housing market looks a bit stretched but I think they put this kind of risk into a broader risk assessment, and this means which kind of debt security am I buying?” says Mr Spies.

“I’m buying a collateralised bank bond rated triple A, from a bank which is rated double A, in a country which is rated triple A,” he adds. “Now let’s put this together and compare it to an Italian covered bond . . .”.

Covered bonds are highly rated, and there are almost no clear instances of investors taking losses. For them to do so, the bank would need to collapse, mortgage borrowers would need to default, and the value of houses reclaimed as collateral would also need to fall steeply.

“There is a long history of bank failure, but for those banks that failed, we’ve never seen a covered bond fail,” says Jane Soldera, a vice-president at Moody’s, the rating agency.

She adds that this means the precedents for such a failure are unclear from an administrative perspective. The unlikelihood of investor losses aside, covered bonds in euros and dollars are an important source of capital flows into the country’s housing market.

Covered bonds in all currencies now finance nearly 10 per cent of the entire Canadian mortgage market, which is close to C$1.4tn in size, according to the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. That proportion was 5 per cent in early 2013 and almost nothing in 2007.

Jerry Marlatt, a lawyer at Morrison Foerster in New York, says Canadian banks’ move for funding in international markets has been helped by the very existence of the euro market.

“Obviously if you can fund mortgage loans with foreign money you free up deposits to be used for other things,” he says. “If you did not have covered bonds, banks would either have to issue more senior debt or take in more deposits, and that’s difficult in Canada”.

Baronjutter posted:

If the pay in vancouver is so low but the talent quality so high, why aren't companies flocking here to set up more permanent offices doing proper work?

Risky Bisquick posted:

What good is growth if our stocks are garbage, stop killing the currency wont you think of our portfolios

Risky Bisquick posted:

Quick name some Canadian companies that are growing and worth investing in. Don’t worry I’ll wait

Hal_2005 posted:

I too laughed at Nortel. Thread has def taken a turn into the surreal. Must be those ultra low rates on home loans goons must be tripping over themselves to take out to buy that 2-bed in Markham.

Can you remember any premier made in Canada products similar to BMW, Iphone or Google

Sure
- Pulse Seismic
- Medtronic DES stimulator
- Open Text
- ATI
- Corelle (and AIM instant messenger)
- Lotus 1-2-3
- Blackberry and SSH server systems
- Magellan Aerospace and half of the SpaceX parts
- Magna automotives, makers of nearly 50% of your mincome second hand Honda and GM poo poo-can compact.
- CGI, proud maker of 80% of the world's internet systems for forward facing gov & mainframes
- Precision drilling; most advanced oil rigs on the planet, no joke.
- Bioware
- Miranda
- Palantir (the master algos were built at Waterloo)
- padd drilling; google it.
- ganong
- cott beverage
- highliner fish products
- Ford escape and about 80% of Ford's R&D programs dating back to the Shelby push at Windsor special projects, including AWD and disc brakes
- Hatch engineering, the only company who you legitimately call when Bechtel or Haliburton fucks something up
- SNC
- lululemmon
- Canaccord
- Scotiabank, largest bank in Latin America by deposits and second largest bank in the entire latinos including mexico
- TD bank, second largest bank now in the US behind JP Morgan
- Manulife, one of the worlds largest underwriters of global risk next to Lloyds of London
- Power corp. If you dont know who the hell these guys are, I cant help you
- McCain french fries; legitimate good PEI oligarchs.
- Boardwalk. Again, if you dont know a gently caress about the largest commercial property manager in the world, I wonder how qualified you are to even post.
- Baurer
- Maple Leaf Foods
- Rexall
- Aliment Couche Tard; the largest kiosk and convenience store owner by footprint next to CVS Healthcare (yes, bigger than 7/11 now you sperglord)
- Bombardier: proud maker of useless make work projects for the redneck trash of Quebec, and giving Casse de Depot grey hairs since 1998. Worst trust fund kiddies on the planet, and that's including Oracle's estate fund.
- Saputo. Largest dairy maker in the public stock world. You cheese eating neckbeards literally consume 3 of their products every day, and the fact you have no clue they even exist is both the funniest thing I have read all week, and the most pathetic.
- Tim Hortons. You laugh, but then again, so did the shareholders who tendered their shares of Burgerking. More indians know what the hell a double double is according to the last trade mission than who barack obama was. Think on that while working your mincome job at Canadian Tire tomorrow.
- Globe & Mail. You laugh at this one, but nearly every editor from John at The Economist to half of Gawker got their start in that shithole. In journalism, Canadian free press and the publishing houses that are now Southham (old Hollinger) are tier one training centers & bull pens for aspiring editors and journalists.
- CP Rail. Want to know who literally moves 40% of the USA finished goods? from your fleshlight to the mountain dew you purchased at wallmart last week? A fat sperglord named Hunter accepts thank you pizzas. He really does too.
- Valiant Pharmaceuticals. I really hope I dont need to explain this one to goons.
- Princess Margaret Cancer Center: Your head would explode if you knew which celeb's, dictators and nearly everyone who the world would write an obituary on, if they died elect to get treated at The Princess vs. Hopkins or Harvard Med. U of T has the top program for emergency booking/100% treatment rates in the OECD for both neurology and onco.
- Onyx Corp. Gerald W. Schwartz. The joke of 'the Schwartz be with you?' its about this guy and how he and Frank Guistra nearly built Canada a entertainment industry.
- Lionsgate. Frank Guistra and Peter Brown. American Psycho is so close to 1980's mining industry reality, your head would again, explode.
- Barrack. Peter Munk.
- The NHL. You laugh about this one, but there is only 2 profitable sports in the world, hockey and F1. While total attendance is way behind FIFA and NBA viewership, a NHL franchise stake is one of the most coveted and lucrative deals in sports finance, with exception to the recent tech bubble bidding up of NBA stakes for marquee teams like the Clippers.


Now lets get to the oft hated energy sector:

- Encana. Second largest natural gas producer in North America, 4th largest natural gas entity in the world. Yes, neckbeard thats 1 behind the much feared Gazprom.
- Cenovus, also known as the brains behind ConocoPhillips.
- Imperial Oil. Straight up known in Exxon Mobil as the training center for Exxon CEO's.
- Calfrac, next to Halliburton the largest and most regarded frac sand manager/completions specialist in the world. Yes, the saudi family personally asks them to come fix their wells for them, along with Precision Drilling. On a first name basis after Halliburton botched Gwar in 2005.
- Paramount Conglomerate.
- CNQ. Because Koch doesn't drill 50% of the US's global crude imports and that crude has to come from somewhere. Ditto all those plastic keyboard parts filled with cheetos dust.
- BP Canada. Now known as that piece of a joke called Talisman. Once upon a time, known as the place which discovered about 38% of the worlds hydrocarbons since 1985. Yes this includes most of the North Sea (Buzzard), the Moray Firth, lake Chad, Ethiopia's Rift basin, the Yemeni Grabbens, and pretty much the entire Java/Indochina basin (now known as Petronas when they nationalized it).
- Niko Exploration. Before Doc ran it into the ground, it was one of the largest discoveries of natural gas in Indian history, it also bailed out the richest family in India, twice. The current Indian "miracle"? due to cheap energy? Thank a furniture salesman from Estavan and a Croatian-Canadian geologist who owed him on a land deal.
- Waterous/Tristone/First Energy. Fun Fact, over 60% of the worlds Asset and Divestiture deals, where oil companies trade their land and production like you trade counterstrike skins? two groups of 28 nerds do that. That may not seem too impressive to your little nerdy worldview, but lets think about that for a moment. Every deal, from Talisman's sale to Repsol to the sale of a natural gas compressor likely went through that office, go get audited and sealed, and valued by every company in the world. Including Citgo.
- Sproule / GLJ Associates: Like the world A&D clearing house, Canada is like Zurich for oil reserve auditing. Yes, even the world bank, when they need to be 100% sure Russia or Argentina is not cooking their reserve books before they offer a bail out package, they call up Calgary. Want to know why Canada seems to punch above its weight in the G7? Its because when it comes to the worlds arguably most important audit, how much energy do you have in the "tank", Canada literally is the auditors seal.

Hope that post gave you a deep drive into Canadian corporate iconic brands. If you want to learn more, I suggest getting educated. Its hard, but way easier on everyone than posting ignorant comments about Nortel. Which was a great example of everything wrong with Ontario and Ontario based liberal corporate governance. John Manley alone is proof of this.

namaste faggots posted:

Risky Bisquick posted:

Quick name some Canadian companies that are growing and worth investing in. Don’t worry I’ll wait

namaste faggots posted:

The Butcher posted:

-3.19%

The Butcher posted:

Just for kicks to kill the end of my shift today I created a HAL portfolio based on all the publicly traded companies in his list, backtested from the day he posted it, Jan 30, 2015.

Assuming an equal weighting of each ticker:

HAL portfolio total return: -3.19%
US total market return: 21.58%
CDN total market return: 2.64%

Best pick: Cott Beverage Corp: 99.48%
Runner up: Maple Leaf foods: 68.45%

Worst pick: Valeant Pharmaceuticals: -89.68%
Runner up: Niko Resources: -78.00%

Winners: financials
Losers: oil/mining

Everything else, pretty mixed bag.

The Butcher posted:

Just for kicks to kill the end of my shift today I created a HAL portfolio based on all the publicly traded companies in his list, backtested from the day he posted it, Jan 30, 2015.

Assuming an equal weighting of each ticker:

HAL portfolio total return: -3.19%
US total market return: 21.58%
CDN total market return: 2.64%

Best pick: Cott Beverage Corp: 99.48%
Runner up: Maple Leaf foods: 68.45%

Worst pick: Valeant Pharmaceuticals: -89.68%
Runner up: Niko Resources: -78.00%

Winners: financials
Losers: oil/mining

Everything else, pretty mixed bag.

Lain Iwakura posted:

I'm glad that Hal is too stupid to work in finance.

The Butcher posted:

Just for kicks to kill the end of my shift today I created a HAL portfolio based on all the publicly traded companies in his list, backtested from the day he posted it, Jan 30, 2015.

Assuming an equal weighting of each ticker:

HAL portfolio total return: -3.19%
US total market return: 21.58%
CDN total market return: 2.64%

Best pick: Cott Beverage Corp: 99.48%
Runner up: Maple Leaf foods: 68.45%

Worst pick: Valeant Pharmaceuticals: -89.68%
Runner up: Niko Resources: -78.00%

Winners: financials
Losers: oil/mining

Everything else, pretty mixed bag.