Canadian Capitalist

I’ll be on a three-week break starting this week, travelling, visiting family and celebrating our boys’ first birthday (I can’t believe it is going to be a year already). I do plan to make an occasional post but I will be taking a bit of a break from blogging as well. I hope everyone is [...]

[Read more →]

Summer is a good time for catching up on the books you have been meaning to read. Here is my list of business and finance books that are on my reading list (I’ve read some of them already):

Blink by Malcolm Gladwell: Mr. Gladwell, a native of Waterloo, who now lives in New York, writes a [...]

[Read more →]

I get paid bi-monthly and I recently received my pay stub for the first half of July. As you may recall, the Harper Government introduced a 1% cut in the GST starting July 1st and increased personal income taxes at the same time. Much ink has been spent debating whether the new tax cuts ultimately [...]

[Read more →]

The Globe and Mail featured an interesting article on how the rapid growth of emerging economies is radically reshaping the global economy. The article points out that the Chinese and Indian economies together are bigger than the United States in purchasing power parity (PPP) terms. This is not a surprise: the combined population of China [...]

[Read more →]

I called Action Direct and asked if they offer any cashable GICs. They do and here is how to find them on their website: Click on the “GICs / Bonds” tab. In the Fixed Income Search box, click on GICs, select type “Annual” and maturity “1 yr” and click the “Find” button. The GICs that [...]

[Read more →]

TD Economics has published a highly readable report on inflation titled Say it ain’t so: Canadians Don’t Believe Inflation Numbers. The report examines if the official CPI numbers accurately reflect price increases experienced by consumers and dispels some of the inflation myths.
The report’s concludes:
Despite being a broad-based measure, we can feel confident that the CPI [...]

[Read more →]

Check out Frugal Canadian’s post about a new savings account from PC Financial called Interest Plus savings account that just might give ING Direct a run for its money. In recent years, ING Direct has become more like one of the big banks, offering an interest rate that is no longer the highest among its [...]

[Read more →]

Bill Miller, the money manager whose annual returns have beaten the S&P 500 index for 15 consecutive years, once again pointed out that the US mega-caps are trading at attractive valuations. Mr. Miller has bought shares in insurance-giant AIG, General Electric (GE), Home Depot (HD) and Citigroup (C). All of them are currently trading at [...]

[Read more →]

Ms. Sheila Copps, former Deputy Prime Minister wants us to pay more taxes to fix all our problems such as infrastructure woes, environmental pollution and even youth crime. It would be pointless for me to argue that we should pay no taxes and hopefully Ms. Copps doesn’t believe that we should pay everything we earn [...]

[Read more →]

While a certain former Deputy Prime Minister goes around advising us that (more) taxes (for the plebeians) will set us free, elected MPs have given themselves a Canada Day gift: they can now apply their per-diem meal expenses to their mortgages they take out on a second home in Ottawa.
Members of Parliament already earn an [...]

[Read more →]