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Air Canada is not the worst in-flight experience, but goddamn are its prices just insane. I just paid $1,100 for a Toronto <-> Calgary roundtrip, and $1,250 for a Toronto -> Kota Kinabalu (Malaysian Borneo) + Bangkok -> Toronto multicity trip. Both are with AC (although to be fair there are an Asiana and Thai Air flight involved in the latter). Figure that one out. Thank god work pays for the first one.
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Mar 19, 2015 03:10
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ChipNDip posted:They always have massive travel and food budgets as well. $12,000 a year for a young couple? And they spend $1000 a month on food for 2 people + the same on restaurants. One or the other is super-eye raising, both is just nuts. I know Canada is a little pricier than the U.S., but come on. $12,000 per year is a lot for travel, I guess, but it's not that hard to do. Travel is insanely expensive. My girlfriend and I will have probably spent, by the end of April, somewhere around $40,000 on travel during the previous year. The 1-week liveaboard scuba trip we took in the Galapagos was close to $14,000 for the two of us alone. Not that this is sustainable behavior, but I say when you're young you ought to take advantage of your spryness and travel as much as you can.
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Mar 23, 2015 01:40
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I guess I should have said that scuba diving at the world's best sites is expensive, ha. If you want to dive with whale sharks and thousands of hammerheads at Darwin's Arch in the Galapagos, you're paying 7 large per person (with the CAD in the shitter as it is) or you're not going at all --- there are only three boats that do it and they're all insanely overpriced. Regardless, I'm not going to apologize for diving in Australia, the Galapagos, Borneo, and Indonesia in the same year  The rest of the time our travel is pretty rustic; out of the month we spent in Australia over the summer the vast majority was a camping road trip.Zero debt, no kids (obviously), both make six figures. I did pay for my first trip to Borneo mostly out of research funds, but I have yet to figure out how to expense a liveaboard trip. I need to find a few macroeconomists who dive and set up a "conference" I guess. Oakland Martini fucked around with this message at 03:38 on Mar 23, 2015 |
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Mar 23, 2015 03:34
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unlimited shrimp posted:Satire is cool & good Ok, maybe I exaggerated. Looking at my travel expense spreadsheets it was closer to $30K.
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Mar 23, 2015 03:35
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blah_blah posted:Man, TT jobs pay 6 figures? I assumed they were more in the 75-90k range. Must be nice to go into a field that actually has a path from grad school -> TT job without languishing in postdoc hell for a while. Econ has some good outside options that push salaries up, what can I say? My gf has a phd too but is in the private sector, actually just started a data science thing like you do if I remember correctly.
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Mar 23, 2015 03:56
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blah_blah posted:So do math and computer science, but I don't think that it affects TT salaries in those fields very much. What are the data science options in Toronto like, out of curiosity? Vancouver still has nothing as far as I can tell. CS doesn't pay well? That's crazy, I would have thought a TT job in CS would pay more than any position outside of a business school. On the second point I don't honestly know, it's a pretty specialized role closely related to her research field. She worked with proprietary data from her current employer during her phd in fact.
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Mar 23, 2015 04:09
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Madrid is loving terrible if you have to transfer from the main international terminal to the domestic one. I had a stop in Madrid on the way to Vigo, and I swear I had to walk five miles to get from one gate to the next. Honestly most of the "great" airports in the world are nothing special. Pearson is really no worse than Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, or Incheon as far as I'm concerned. Maybe if you are flying business and you get to use whatever amazing lounges those airports have things are different...
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Feb 23, 2016 20:50
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It's clear that Chinese investment has driven home prices upwards, particularly in Vancouver and Toronto, but it's difficult to make any quantitative conclusions given the lack of data on the size of Chinese investment flows. It's not surprising that there's no substantive work yet. I do like the new report's point that the wild variation in price-income growth across Canadian cities suggests country-wide factors like low interest rates can't be the only factor. I'm actually working on a paper to estimate the elasticity of house prices to foreign market participation using counterfactual simulations from an equilibrium model, but it's been slow going. I've recently gotten access to some supercomputing resources, so I'm hoping to have some conclusions at the end of the summer.
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May 9, 2016 17:13
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Cultural Imperial posted:http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-10/the-engine-poloz-hopes-will-drive-canada-s-recovery-is-misfiring Manufacturing jobs will never come back. I have a paper coming out soon looking at this topic for the US, and the story is the same for Canada: labor productivity has grown much more rapidly in manufacturing than in the rest of the economy, so we need far fewer employees to produce the same amount of goods. In particular, competition from abroad has little impact on overall manufacturing employment in the US, and I bet the same is true for Canada. Maybe slightly more since Canada is a more open economy.
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May 11, 2016 01:22
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El Scotch posted:I'd actually be interested in reading that - PM me if it's posted somewhere later. I do not have PMs, so in the interest of providing a tiny barrier to identifying me (although it's incredibly easy), here is a Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/s/m063j0rkjf9vad9/SavingGlutFeb16.pdf?dl=0. It's an NBER working paper, but the the February version, which includes revisions requested by the Journal of Political Economy, is much better.
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May 11, 2016 13:31
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Cultural Imperial posted:Do you mean productivity or labor efficiency? Labor efficiency does not have a conventional definition. Labor productivity is a standard term, here defined as the ratio of manufacturing real value added to hours worked in manufacturing. Its growth is driven largely by technological progress. In the US, manufacturing labor productivity has grown about 3% per year faster than productivity in other sectors since the 1950s --- this is not a recent phenomenon. I expect the same is true for Canada.
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May 11, 2016 13:35
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MickeyFinn posted:Holy poo poo, a working paper from August 2013? I weep for you. I'm not even sure I remember what was in my papers from that far back. The most recent version was finished in February. Publishing in economics is ridiculous. It can take over ten years to go from submission to publication in top journals. I don't know how the gently caress you are supposed to get tenure that way.
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May 12, 2016 10:06
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Good op-ed by some VERY intelligent economists: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/rob-commentary/bad-policy-has-played-a-role-in-canadas-housing-crisis/article35019958/
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May 18, 2017 16:01
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Tal's views on Toronto real estate are stupid. This "global city" thing is nonsense. SF, NY, etc. have seen rents rise dramatically alongside prices. The place I live in now (for which I pay 2,750 per month) would rent for CAD 5,000 in SF/NY but I bet its market price would be comparable. I went to a similar presentation a whole back and asked him how his story is consistent with price-rent ratio dynamics and he ignored me.
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Jun 27, 2017 17:13
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Eh Benny Tal seems pretty dumb on housing from the convos I have had with him. Of course, I'm an economics professor so I must be pretty moronic as well...
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Jul 20, 2017 19:34
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namaste faggots posted:Are you at lakehead? I'll pay you $500 to punch di Matteo in the loving face No fortunately I work someplace slightly better than that, ha.
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Jul 20, 2017 19:53
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Not sure exactly what the y-axis is (don't have a BB terminal at hand), but it's likely misleading. Housing starts should be normalized by some measure of the existing housing stock or, at the very least, the number of households. I'm guessing the graph's units are just thousands of housing starts.
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Aug 9, 2017 16:00
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EvilJoven posted:That's the biggest problem with Toronto. It was so time consuming and logistically frustrating to do anything but spend money on food drink and distractions. While there were a lot of outdoor amenities, getting to them if you didn't happen to live right next to it sucked, a lot. This is my issue with Toronto, too. It was fun to explore the restaurant scene when I first moved here, but I'm mostly interested in biking, hiking, etc. There are okay (but not great) places to do these things near Toronto, but getting to them is such a hassle that it takes all the fun out of it. Doing pretty much anything other than walking to a restaurant on College St is a pain in the rear end.
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Nov 23, 2017 16:14
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I mean it should be province wide, he's right about that.
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Mar 1, 2018 21:37
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There's a big grocery store in the basement of the building at York and Lakeshore.
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Apr 23, 2018 14:01
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When I moved to Toronto in 2013, I was 29 and had zero savings as I had been in grad school for 5 years earning $15K a year, so I had to rent. Plus I didn't want to buy anything until after I got (or didn't get) tenure. Now I'm 35 and still renting even though my household income is in the top 1%. My partner and I hate condos and while we could probably afford an SFH, it's just a stupid amount of money to spend on a house, and there's a decent chance I won't get tenure next year anyway. And if I do, I still don't see us buying anything here.
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May 7, 2019 16:55
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Throatwarbler posted:lmao whites always have a mortgage and therefore their level of asset ownership must track their taxable income exactly, white people never do things like get old and retire, or buy a house when they are young and earning money and then retire while living in the same house, or "save money", otherwise accumulate assets throughout their lives in any way. There is no way for asset prices to deviate from income other than the relentless yellow hordes. So there's nothing wrong with house prices decoupling from local incomes? Nothing wrong with the hollowing-out of Vancouver's economy that has slowly occurred over the last 20 years that is a direct consequence of this decoupling? Nothing wrong with the opioid abuse crisis that is also almost surely a direct result of this trend? In a normal economy, of course there people at different demographic life stages that have earnings that may be at odds with the value of their individual homes. But on average, the young people and old people should cancel each other out. The statistic Gordon is looking at is the ratio of the average house price to the average income, and in a well-functioning economy both the numerator and denominator should grow at the same rate. A key part of the problem in Vancouver is precisely that there fewer and fewer high-income young people to cancel out the olds and the growing number of satellite families, and that is why his statistic, which is a standard measure of housing market "bubbliness," by the way, has risen so dramatically. And yes, I am an expert on the macroeconomics of housing (I just got a large grant to study foreign ownership, in fact).
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Jun 21, 2019 20:46
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qhat posted:I think you misunderstood that post. That study directly attributes non resident ownership as the single cause of that decoupling using nothing more than a univariate analysis on very flimsy data point. He then concludes that because he can't see an alternative cause, that this means you can ignore the age old rule that correlation does not equal causation, which is such a crock of horse poo poo that it's amazing this came out of someone who apparently has a PhD. I understood the post fine. In short, it asserted that house prices decoupling from incomes is a normal phenomenon that we should expect to see because people retire and live in expensive houses (that they purchased in their prime earning years) when they have low incomes. Which I pointed out is incoherent. I also understand the correlation vs. causation "issue." In fact, the purpose of my research is to develop a quantitative model to perform counterfactual simulations that I can use to measure the causal contribution of foreign ownership to the housing bubble. But in the case of Vancouver, the facts are so blindingly obvious that anyone who argues foreign ownership has nothing to do with housing prices is a moron or arguing in bad faith, or both. The data, as sparse as they are (and they are sparse because of intentional obfuscation of the problem by the previous government and the real estate industry), have only one sensible interpretation. Hence the scare quotes above. And yes, white people can be foreign owners. There are tons of rich Americans there, as the poster above you pointed out.
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Jun 21, 2019 22:24
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Femtosecond posted:I'm not an academic so I don't know how angry academic rivalries usually go, but I assumed that this paper was by intention, mostly a sort of 'shot across the bow' of YIMBYs. It stopped short mostly because the author was essentially saying, "this is obvious and I don't actually need to get deeper into this, so the onus is on you if you disagree with me." This is all about right in my eyes. Quite honestly, the whole "correlation is not causation" thing is more often than not deployed under false pretenses as a way to get around Occam's Razor. Gordon has put together some data that are strongly indicative of foreign buyers' influence. There are lots of other data points that corroborate this idea, and pretty much nothing out there that rebuts it. Sure, it's not definitive proof. But there are no other plausible causes for these data. And by the way, the other guy somehow thought that an Assistant Professor is a research assistant or something, not a tenure-track (but not yet tenured) faculty member (going by the "assistant to the professor" snark, anyway). Oakland Martini fucked around with this message at 00:11 on Jun 23, 2019 |
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Jun 23, 2019 00:07
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The whole idea of defining "affordable" as "10-20% below market" is nonsensical and only encourages higher market rents, especially when we require that developers ensure that a fraction of units in new developments are "affordable" according to this definition. It reminds me a lot of the Obamacare requirement that insurance companies must spend at least 80% of their revenues on health care; insurer profits can rise under Obamacare only if health care costs rise, so insurers have no incentive to push for lower prices. The definition of affordability should be tied to median income.
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Jul 23, 2019 17:41
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I've looked at a few houses over the past two weeks in Toronto and all have sold for 300-400K over asking. I saw one on Ossington Ave near Dupont that was listed for 850K and sold for 1.35M. Another was listed for 1.6M sold for 2.1M (the seller bought it for 1.7M in December!).
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Feb 6, 2021 04:34
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It's the St. Louis Federal Reserve's data repository. It's probably the single most reputable economic data source out there. That said I, I believe the graph is probably for the us, not Canada, based on the label.
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Feb 22, 2021 00:35
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MagicCube posted:I live in Toronto, in a permit parking area and have had a street parking permit before. My street is full of two groups of cars, one that parks during the day for work and shopping and the residents who come leave in the morning and come back in the evening. I have a parking permit and my apartment is right up the street from a long-term care home/medical complex and Kensington Market. There are plenty of empty spaces at night but it's impossible to find parking during the day. If I run an errand before it gets dark I have no hope of finding parking on my street. It's super annoying, especially when it's nice out on the weekend and people drive to the area to go to restaurants and walk around. It's bad enough that I really try to avoid going anywhere during the day by car (i.e. to the grocery store) unless absolutely necessary. I'm not going to say that replacing a parking lot with affordable housing isn't good policy, but I can understand the frustration.
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Mar 2, 2021 20:13
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Subjunctive posted:I live in an area where it’s often hard to find a spot too, but I don’t see or hear about people parking across a driveway for half a day. Does that happen where you are? There are very few driveways on my street (most parking is in a laneway). But I do know one neighbor regularly has this problem, although it's partly because the driveway is difficult to notice.
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Mar 3, 2021 01:55
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Cold on a Cob posted:loving amazing. Why is this amazing? Even if prices tracked median household incomes exactly and sales volume (in number of units) was constant, every month would set a record for highest dollar sales volume.
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Mar 5, 2021 20:56
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Ok, I see. Didn't realize there was so much variation across months in sales!
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Mar 5, 2021 22:53
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I've looked at a bunch of houses in Toronto in the last year (20-30 maybe), and it's definitely the norm to have the seller do an inspection. I don't think I've seen a single one without one.
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Nov 26, 2021 20:25
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Going back to last year's housing prices wouldn't wreck a thing.
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Jan 26, 2022 23:39
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qhat posted:He's not talking about going back to last year's prices. He's talking about a crisis of confidence in the Canadian credit market. If the banks stop lending because too many people start defaulting, it would devastate not just the housing market, but pretty much every private industry that relies on being able to borrow cheaply and consumers having money to spend. I just don't buy that a 25% drop in prices (which would take us to last year's prices more or less) would cause such a crisis of confidence. Prices need to drop at 40-50% to be in line with fundamentals anyway.
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Jan 27, 2022 02:17
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qhat posted:Why not? Did you not see what happened in 2007? Nothing much really happened to the Canadian housing market during the Great Recession, at least compared to what happened down south. Prices fell more in Toronto in 2017 than in 2008-2009, in fact, and nothing happened in terms of a sudden halt in lending or anything like that. Besides, it's patently ridiculous to argue that we couldn't go back to where things were a year ago without everything blowing up. Things were fine then (well, they weren't really, prices were already way too high) and they'd be fine again if we went right back there. Oakland Martini fucked around with this message at 03:04 on Jan 27, 2022 |
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Jan 27, 2022 03:02
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qhat posted:I was making a point that you're being very overconfident that something like what happened in the USA couldn't possibly happen here because back to my original question, why not? I'm just saying that a price decline of that size wouldn't cause it all by itself. We're not talking about erasing 5-6 years of price growth (like the collapse in the US did), but just a single year's. That's far fewer people that could end up underwater on their mortgages. And remember, the Fed raises interest rates by 400 basis points between Q42004 and Q42006, so people with variable rate mortgages in the US had a massive increase in carrying costs. There's no way we're looking at any more than half that in the next few years here. I just don't see it.
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Jan 27, 2022 03:13
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And REITs are tricky because many of them (I don't know about this one specifically) hold commercial real estate, which was in a super sticky situation at the beginning of the pandemic with the collapse of retail, which was never true of residential.
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Jan 27, 2022 03:17
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A supply shortage decades in the making can't possibly account for prices rising 20-30% in a single year. It's obvious that changes on the demand side are responsible. That said, it's important to recognize that the highly inelastic nature of housing supply plays a big role in explaining why shifts in demand can have such large effects on prices.
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Feb 10, 2022 02:37
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Subjunctive posted:Those numbers in banks are money, just like the credits and debits that happen when my employer electronically deposits my salary are money. Money is “socially-recognized purchasing power”, not specific physical artifacts—that’s currency. There are actually no reserve requirements at all in Canada.
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Mar 24, 2022 15:31
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There are some differences between the US and Canadian mortgage markets that make comparing rates not exactly apples-to-apples (most importantly you cannot get a rate fixed for an entire 30-year term in Canada). But rates definitely never got as low during the pandemic in the US as they did in Canada. - See here for US mortgage data: https://themortgagereports.com/61853/30-year-mortgage-rates-chart. - See chart 7 here for Canadian data: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/11-621-m/11-621-m2021001-eng.htm. I read these as saying that US rates fell by 100bps and Canadian by about 150bps. And I think qhat is right on the money that the BoC's mortgage bond buying program was an important factor. Totally asinine policy if you ask me. Oakland Martini fucked around with this message at 21:05 on May 26, 2022 |
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May 26, 2022 21:01
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