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moneysense.ca, 5/02/09
This and That: Falling BRICs Edition
- Jon Chevreau highlights the dangers of chasing “hot” asset classes by pointing out that BRICs were down by 50% in 2008 after posting eye-popping returns in previous years.
- Rob Carrick says that the big banks are pushing through new fees and increasing fees and interest rates but it does pay to complain.
- James Daw reports that Ontario drivers are facing a stiff premium increase this year.
- Larry MacDonald discovers that Claymore has initiated a DRIP and Pre-authorized cash contribution plan for its stable of ETFs.
- As the annual reports from the big Banks reach our mail boxes, how easy is it to understand a Bank’s balance sheet? Fabrice Taylor of the Globe and Mail finds out.
- Gail Vaz-Oxlade offers tips on negotiating with credit card companies to lower the interest rate.
- Preet answered a reader question on how much of a RESP should be invested in fixed income.
- Michael James provided his take on the latest SPIVA report card.
- Thicken My Wallet wrote a guest post on Million Dollar Journey on the Lipson case verdict.
- The Dividend Guy on three free sources for dividend data.
Have a great weekend everyone!
moneysense.ca, 5/02/09
Thanks for the mention CC, have a great weekend!
Thanks for the mention! Enjoy your weekend.
If you think the falling BRIC countries are bad, how does this morning’s employment figures grab ya? 129,000 losses in January? Yikes. I thought it was worse than the economist forecast, but I didn’t think it would be over 100K.
Unfortunately, I don’t think many of the manufacturing jobs will be coming back, no matter how low the BoC drops interest rates. With NAFTA, it’s 1/10th the labour cost to make the same product in Mexico. Or even cheaper in other countries even with the tariffs. Welcome to the new reality.
Phil: Yikes is right. The resource boom in the Western provinces masked jobs weakness in Ontario during the boom years but now it’s even worse. I agree that most of the manufacturing jobs are never coming back. I know the pain — in the software industry, outsourcing has been going on for a long time. It is so much easier to ship tech jobs to lower-cost geographies. I’m not sure if it’s a new reality — we’ve been living with this for more than 5 years now.
Hi CC. I guess what I really meant by the new reality is that our economy can no longer count on manufactured exports to provide a stable footing on which everything else can build anymore. An ever increasing percentage of our export economy will be purely commodity based, which means that we will have even more extreme boom & bust cycles as commodity cycles are extremely volatile. As more and more third world economies around the world also turn to the export of natural resources, even that sector will have to compete against countries with labour rates that are pennies to our dollar. I think our standard of living in the future will be MUCH much lower.
Hmm… But since I’m about to take off on vacation (I have not missed the irony that the loonie took a huge dip today as I get ready to board my flight), I should have ended on a more positive note. With countries like India and China graduating thousands of engineers and programmers for every one that we graduate – and they’re all willing to work for 1/10th of what we expect to get paid… I don’t think that our future economy will be in the technical fields as those industries will just get slaughtered. I think we should focus on fields where intellectual property holds more value: Arts & culture, research & development and possibly finance should become the stable exports of the future on which our volatile commodities can supplement.
Merci Buckets to you as well CC!