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Email this6:53 am
July 30, 2009
Offline
So I stop by the local Pizza pizza shop. I had not been in there for a while. Pizza pizza has (or should I say had) one of the best deals until some time ago.
Well the old deal is gone and the new deal has a whopping 20% price increase! I talked to the guy behind the counter and he claims every year prices on pizzas in general go up about 7 to 10%.
I did not get a salary increase this year.
The statistics the government publishes on inflation rate are a lie. According to the statistics, consumer prices are stagnant or have fallen. The only thing falling however is our purchasing power and interest paid on our deposits. We can buy less and less every year with the money we earn. Even if I had got a salary increase this year, I gurantee you it would be well below the real rate of inflation which is perhaps 5 to 7%.
The fiat money system is a fraud where money is just printed up and handed out for free to banks, financials and other assorted middlemen & crooks. They have hijacked the system. They are just living off the sweat and toil of the people while offering nothing of any value except being middlemen.
11:40 pm
1. The fiat money system in Canada is working. Government is handing out money to the banks at low rates because its a Ecnomic monetary policy used to get us out of a recession.
2. Just because food prices went up there are other commodities out there becides pizza that indicates inflation. Take for instance how gas prices last year was about 1.15/litre.
3. I would doubt that the pizzaman who has to bake pizzas knows exactly how much their prices have inflated. He was probably making a number up in his head. It's not like he sits behind the counter calculating the trend of pizza prices over the past decade.
7:58 am
Remember you can have a deflationary environment in an inflationary one. Food, clothing and gas/oil can be inflationary (small costs), while big cost items like houses, cars, equipment, technology can go down in price. Look at the prices of these big ticket items and you will see that a $2 increase on the price of a pizza is preferable to drop of $100k on a house, $10k on a car, etc.
Mike
12:48 am
July 30, 2009
Offline
1. The fiat money system in Canada is working. Government is handing out money to the banks at low rates because its a Ecnomic monetary policy used to get us out of a recession.
The productive segment of the economy is just being used to subsidize the non-productive (read useless) middleman segment of the economy which are banks & financials.
Banks & financials do not produce any scientific breakthroughs, nor advance any technology nor produce any tangible goods other than paper shuffling. If the people have to bare the loss the banks incur while they reap the profits on the way up (and down for that matter via fees, zero interests..etc), then there is no use for them whatsoever. Its better that the govt lend the money directly to the people insted of involving a middle man industry. The government (read people's) treasury at least gets a share of the profits, not just loss.
preferable to drop of $100k on a house, $10k on a car, etc.
Not unless you are silly enough to buy a house in what is an overpriced real estate market is it preferable. Or you are a house flipper or silly enough to take out a home equity line of credit on an overpriced house. These people are irresponsible gamblers and they need to eat their losses.
That aside it looks like a real ponzi scheme where government has to inflate something by robbing money from hardworking producers of soceity. What of the people who need housing prices to drop as they should so they can afford one or people who have worked hard to save their money. They are being ripped off big time.
I'd like the government to pay for my losses as well. A nice fat sum of money now will prevent a loss of a greater amount down the road (or so I can claim). Anyone can make that claim.
1:48 am
The Bank of Canada cannot lend money to each individual person to try to stimulate the economy. The transaction costs associated with that would be gigantic. That isn't the purpose of the Bank of Canada. Just imagine every Canadian walking up to the parliament building with a money sack demanding credit.
You're making our banking systems and chartered banks sound like crooks and we can do without them. Canada has one of the soundest banking system in the world. To suggest that Canada do without them would be disasterous.
I'm not sure if the reason you don't like banks is because they make money off of you or you had a bad experience in the past. But chartered banks are businesses too. They are only as good as the profit they make. Even ING and PC need to make a profit and in the next few decade or two when they grow I wouldn't be surprised if they introduce service charges as their overhead expenses increase.
9:12 am
Hornswoggler - Agree with you 100% on RE and banks.
"Banks & financials do not produce any scientific breakthroughs, nor advance any technology nor produce any tangible goods other than paper shuffling. Its better that the govt lend the money directly to the people insted of involving a middle man industry. The government (read people's) treasury at least gets a share of the profits, not just loss."
This is the worst time to buy RE, rates are already going up (see TD real estate backed LOC's jump 44% today in the news).
Guest - "Canada has one of the soundest banking system in the world"
That is only because the financial bar has been lowered. Canadian banks look good vs US banks. Banks are guilty of 10-1 (or greater lending), putting profits before people and just plain agressive greed within the last 10 years. Are they sound? I'm not trusting any of them over the CDIC limit with my deposits.
4:58 pm
In response to Mike
Canada's banking system was voted number 1 (2008)followed by Sweden, Luxembourg and Australia.
We are not number 1 because "Canadian banks look good vs US banks."
In fact U.S.A was voted 40th.
I could care less if you guys don't trust the banks. If you really feel that way then keep all your money under your mattress at night instead of at the "greedy" banks.
Remember banks are a business too and if they didn't make a profit then everyone in Canada would be screwed.
7:17 am
July 30, 2009
Offline
I'm afraid a vast number of people are very ignorant about where and how money is created and who controls it.
If you do manage to educate yourself somehow about what the fiat monetary system is all about, you will realise what a scam it is.
I suggest you start the process of educating yourself by reading the book "Web of Debt" to open your eyes.
It beats bleating out stuff from the media like "our banks are the best in the world". Understand that many banks that were supposedly "the best in the world" back in 2007 don't even exist today. Those that do have sucked vast amounts of resources out of the real economy via the government. The proclamations of economists who never saw a massive crisis looming, useless bankers, the media..etc are as worthless as these lists. So flush it down the toilet along with their opinions.
There's a ton of resources out there I could direct you to but you'll have to do the research for yourself and start thinking for yourself. Its important that you do the research as what will happen in the next few years will dramatically affect your wealth & prosperity.
12:54 pm
So what are you going to do, fly to Brazil and join one of those nomadic tribes that subsists on the land and barters for goods and services? Or maybe you can spend the rest of your life hooting and hollering in front of Parliament Hill for a return to the gold standard (it's not going to happen)? The fact of the matter is, anyone in civilized society who wants to maximize their chances of securing a future for themselves and their family has no choice but to game the current system as best they can. The alternative is a descent into anarchy, and if that happens, then God help us all.
4:41 pm
So it sounds like Hornswoggler is calling my uneducated.
Well i work at a chartered bank
Im going to a post secondary institution. Majoring in accounting and minoring in Law and Ecnomics.
So yes i do know what i'm talking about and not getting my argument from the "media."
And i agree with Scone. If you think our paper money is soooo useless and a scam then go try the bartering system and stop shopping with your legal canadian tender.
10:38 pm
Yeah, that's all fine and dandy, but it is a scam. It's a complete con job, the entire lot of it, from top to bottom.
It's up to each individual to decide if and how they want to play in the big con. That's all. But make no mistake; it's a total racket purposely designed to keep most people down and distracted.
10:34 am
Hornswoggler: I've always wondered why the government doesn't offer zero-interest loans to Canadians for mortgages. Shelter is such a basic need and at least 50% of the population would benefit from this. The gov, representing us, does not need to make profit, it just needs to do the administration. Imagine how much more disposable income people would have if crushing costs like mortgages didn't include all this interest calculated on the principal. Sure, there would still be token fees for getting the paperwork done, but the point would be to break even, and imagine what a great change this could be for Canadians. It's certainly something I'd be happy to see my taxes go toward, instead of handouts to banks and other middlemen.
Guest said:
So it sounds like Hornswoggler is calling my uneducated.
Well i work at a chartered bank
Im going to a post secondary institution. Majoring in accounting and minoring in Law and Ecnomics.
So yes i do know what i'm talking about and not getting my argument from the "media."
And i agree with Scone. If you think our paper money is soooo useless and a scam then go try the bartering system and stop shopping with your legal canadian tender.
I tend to feel the reality is probably somewhere in the middle. I don't call our current system an outright scam that would have me picketing in the streets, nor do I want to give everything up and return to subsistence living. I just think it could be a lot better.
One of my issues is: I've yet to see proof that the fiat money system is sustainable in the long term. There are many examples where fiat money systems have failed spectacularly.
Some day, if nothing changes, it will cost $500 to buy a chocolate bar. What are we supposed to do then, agree to shift the decimal point to the left two spots nationwide? How about avoid it getting to that point in the first place? Neither inflation nor deflation should occur and the value of things shouldn't be changing so much over the course of a small handful of decades. There is obviously something wrong with the equation that this constant inflation is happening in a fiat system.
We wouldn't need to make interest on our savings accounts or invest in stocks to make a profit if the cost of living didn't keep going up every year. Ideally, $1 today should buy the same it bought 50 years ago, and the same it would buy 500 years from today. Wages should also be the same over time in a balanced system. A system that requires endless growth (economic growth, in our case) seems to be a system guaranteed to fail in the long term because the growth we're enjoying is a temporary phenomenon. The human population won't keep going up forever, eventually it will outright shrink later this century. Blatant consumerism is already near a saturation point (people realize more "stuff" isn't worth it and many outright mock materialistic consumerists now), etc.
Then there's the issue of increasing automation of both manual blue collar and white collar "thinking" jobs. 2/3 of tech job losses in the near future in North America are projected to be from automation, with only 1/3 from outsourcing to other countries. That will further slow down economic growth since what's an economy without enough employed people who can afford to be consumers? In addition, not all factory and service workers are mentally capable to be retrained to be creative geniuses. Not all white collar workers can up the ante and become someone like Elon Musk. It's simple reality -- so unemployment will continue to grow percentage point by percentage point over time. Greying demographics is another factor that will slow growth.
To the economists out there: what is the answer to the questions and issues I've posed in this post? Is the current economic system and the current money system fitting for the type of flatlined, shrinking, or essentially POST-growth civilization we'll be in later this century? Personally I think all these models will be turned on their heads once most technology becomes self-teaching and self-improving. Human labour -- both physical and intellectual -- is closer to obsolescence than most realize if you closely follow tech trends over time like people like Ray Kurzweil or organizations like the World Future Society do.
Yeah, sometimes I think a bit far ahead, but considering how slowly governments change and adapt, it's important to think about these things well ahead of time.
6:34 pm
K when you asked why the government doesn't give out 0% mortgage. If it did everyone would be lining up to get a "free mortgage." The Government in turn (who is by the way in a deficit) would need to print large quantities of money to hand out the 0% mortgage. Result :HYPERINFLATION.
So... later on when you said why does there have to be inflation... your first point of why the government doesn't hand out 0% mortgages contradicts the no infation idea.
12:37 pm
Guest said:
So it sounds like Hornswoggler is calling my uneducated.
Well i work at a chartered bank
Im going to a post secondary institution. Majoring in accounting and minoring in Law and Ecnomics.
So yes i do know what i'm talking about and not getting my argument from the "media."
And i agree with Scone. If you think our paper money is soooo useless and a scam then go try the bartering system and stop shopping with your legal canadian tender.
Here we go with the old, "I have more paper documents to say I'm better than you are" gambit.
What will you do with your "legal Canadian tender" when it becomes worthless due to inflation? It's coming. Oh but wait, I forgot, you know what you're talking about, so everyone else had better shut up.
2:33 pm
May 15, 2007
Offline
Please, no more personal attacks on this forum. It detracts from productive discussions.
10:54 am
For some reason quoting isn't working for me today, so in response to "governments don't give out 0% mortgages because they'd have to print money to do so, are currently in deficit, and hyperinflation would be the result" then I ask why the alternative of them printing money to bail out banks or large companies that are purportedly too big to fail is any better? I prefer when governments help citizens directly instead of enabling "moral hazard" by rewarding institutions and sectors for poor performance.
Sure, funding 0% mortgages for all citizens would cost tax dollars, but I'd sure rather see my tax dollars go to that program (housing is a basic priority to the majority of Canadians) than see bailouts of obsolete or poorly managed sectors including middleman financial institutions forcing people to pay several digits of interest equaling thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars for many mortgages over the life of the mortgage.
Just think of how much more discretionary spending consumers would have if not saddled by the huge interest portion of mortgages.
If you screw up financially or have bankruptcy on your credit history the gov wouldn't take on that high risk, to help keep program costs low, but you can still opt to pay through the nose for a private mortgage from a middleman.
Anyhow, just tossing some ideas out there as the current way things are going isn't working well and is too expensive for the working class or often even the middle class. Considering how the only "work" the financial institution did for my mortgage was receive paperwork at the beginning and electronically take the money out of my account once a week for years on end, I do not see how that's worth the thousands and thousands in interest payments to them over time. Non-profit entities (gov or not) should be handling mortgages.
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