April 12, 2022

• Investors looking for growth are looking to Canadian stocks. Especially after the recent budget which seeks to pour billions into profit subsidy and resource extraction

• This is interesting only in relation to the rest of the world and options for investors, investing when inflation is hight, and the talk of recession is in the air.
• Canada becomes a safer bet because it is essentially a commodity proxy.
• The other market that will see an influx of funds is art.
• Look for a shift in investment away from Long Term Care REITs and towards market rent-adjusted ones. This will undermine the push towards more LTC supports in Ontario and other privatized markets.
• Investors are looking at a history they did not live through to deal with higher inflation and a sputtering economy – because they only work on correlation and not materialist analysis.

• Of course, the mainstream are determined to tell people that all the signs that used to be used to tell a recession are coming are the wrong ones to look at.

  • The take-home of this analysis? "Jobless rate is low, so no recession"
  • The answer to this? "you get unemployment in a recession, but that unemployment didn't cause the recession"

Only time will tell.

• With inflation in the US being announced to day (probably near 8.5%) here is a poll of Canadian cost of living impacts.

The situation in France for the working class and the poor is untenable.

• Jean-Luc Mélenchon had a message for his supporters: they should not give “a single vote” to far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round in two weeks. But Mélenchon stopped short of prompting supporters to vote for Macron, and his party is due to consult members on whether to do so.
• In 2017 Macron won backing from about 50 per cent of Mélenchon’s base in the second round, surveys showed.
• Macron waters down key pension reform in bid to woo left

• President backs away from pledge to raise retirement age to 65 as he courts working-class voters in run-off against Le Pen

The president told BFM TV on Monday evening that if there was “too much tension” the rollout could be stopped in 2027, when the retirement age would have reached 64. He did not rule out offering a referendum on the pensions plan.

Many have yet to be convinced. Guillaume Godin, a 39-year-old teacher who voted for Mélenchon, said Macron and Le Pen were as bad as each other on environmental issues. “I don’t feel like going out to help Macron again,” Godin said. “It’ll be another lost five years either way.”

President Joe Biden will announce during a trip to Iowa on Tuesday that the Environmental Protection Agency will issue a national emergency waiver to allow E15 gasoline — petrol containing up to 15 per cent ethanol, higher than the standard 10 per cent — to be sold across the US this summer.

• In contrast to E10, which makes up the bulk of gasoline sold in the United States, the sale of E15 is typically banned during the summer under the Clean Air Act because of air pollution concerns.

• The debate is raging in Europe how to respond to extremely high inflation. Most of those moneterists who supported the Euro creation want very high interest rates.
• War (and increased energy costs) is a large factor in these price inflation numbers.
• The European Central Bank has had effectively negative interest rates since about 2012 in an attempt to keep money flowing and artificially increase profits.

• Except farmers and teachers, they are older

  • Almost one-third of U.S. farmers are age 65 or older, and 56% are 55+
  • the median (US) high school teacher now almost 50 years old – up from 45 in 2019.
• Along with younger (virtual?) workplaces, the length of the workday has increased significantly. The increased productivity gains from this will be difficult for managers (who are useless generally) to square with the forced return to the office.
• Microsoft has found that:

The average workday has expanded by 46 minutes, or 13%, since the pandemic began…

…with time spent on after-hours work growing even more quickly, at 28%. The data show how workers have increasingly adopted more asynchronous schedules, which don’t always line up with those of their far-flung colleagues or managers.