​‘Maxed out’: 48% of Canadians on brink of insolvency, survey says.

Whaaaat?

48% - of Canadians are $200 or less away from financial insolvency every month.

35% - say an interest rate increase would move them towards bankruptcy.

54% - worry about their ability to repay debts. 

40% - said they won’t be able to cover all living and family expenses in the next 12 months without taking on more debt. 

​55% - say they are $200 or less away from the financial brink in Atlantic Canada.

51% - say the same thing in Quebec.
​
48% - say the same thing in Ontario.

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​But this is not new news because since the July 2008 commodity peak, the Canadian Balance of Trade has been negative for 77% of the time (monthly prints). Also the Federal Direct Investment metrics have been negative for the last 20 years and the spread has widened in the last 3. CLICK CHART TO ENLARGE

...and the Yield Curve

The flattening of the yield curve is a signal from the bond market that it is worried about the economy and its ability to continue to grow. In addition, it is a signal that future inflation is nowhere to be seen. One outcome of an inverted yield curve is a weakening in bank lending as banks begin to earn less profits from making loans. In the most recent earnings announcements, the banks have already made this clear as they expect net interest margins to contract. This is because a bank’s role is to borrow funds at usually lower short-term rates and lend those funds at usually higher longer-term interest rates. The spread between these two rates represents the banks’ profits.

However, with an inverted yield curve, the spread between the short-term and long-term rates narrows and the banks’ incentives to lend are greatly reduced. Not only is the profit margin eroded by the yield curve, but the banks could become worried about the possibility of an economic slowdown. As banks become less incentivized to extend credit (make loans) to their customers, it results in a vital lifeline of the economy being choked off. PacificaPartners.ca

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As we wait for the first week of April to unfold and the March real estate data to come in, questions about the stock market's melt-up comes via  @anilvohra69

Bubbles have a blowoff phase lasting 21 months. Using a 5% threshold, the run from Feb 16 to Dec 17 was 22 months.

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​During Toronto's 21 month "melt-up", listing levels crashed as the fear of missing out kept sellers out of the market. Post melt-up, Toronto sales are testing the lows as buyers fear getting in.  ​​Markets are related. Real Estate valuations are not immune.

Global Risks 2018
According to the IMF, over the past three decades 53% of countries have seen an increase in income inequality, with this trend particularly pronounced in advanced economies. Furthermore, today’s economic strains are likely to sow the seeds for longer-term problems. High levels of personal debt, coupled with inadequate savings and pension provisions, are one reason to expect that frustrations may deepen in the years ahead. We highlight four concerns: (1) persistent inequality and unfairness, (2) domestic and international political tensions, (3) environmental dangers and (4) cyber vulnerabilities. We conclude by reflecting on the increased dangers of systemic breakdown. World Economic Forum

​Strongest 'Bubble Burst'' Alarm Just Went Off
Jeremy Grantham 2018

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"While there is a lot of talk about how employment is becoming more temporary, this graph from joint work with Alex Thomson and Arthur Sweetman shows that the average time that the currently employed has been with the same employer has been almost constant at just over 100 months since 1976." ​Hat Tip to Macleans.ca

The Precarious Generation

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Buying real estate at the top of a market requires cash flow during a correction event unless repricing of the asset is of no concern.

​Vikram Pandit, who ran Citigroup Inc. during the financial crisis, says technological advances could make 30 percent of banking jobs disappear in five years.

McKinsey & Co. partner Jared Moon predicts that technologies sweeping through investment banks will relieve rank-and-file employees of about a third of their current workload.

Management consultant Opimas LLC  says about four of every five Wall Street firms have already implemented, or plan to use, some form of AI, according to Greenwich Associates.

Automation Entering White-Collar Work
"I witnessed 40% of my department laid off"
Quote from a bank mortgage department employee
Source: CBC's The National, March 2017 

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The worsening of (housing) affordability in Q4 (2016) was the sixth quarterly deterioration in a row, the longest run in almost 20 years. National Bank of Canada FEB 8, 2017 Report My long term chart study of housing starts vs population growth currently projects a 7% Y/Y decrease for full year 2017.

Most people are at best only aware of two choices, two patterns, for land ownership – private ownership (which we associate with the industrial West) and state ownership (as in the Communist East).
The Idea of Owning Land by Robert Gilman 1984

"We don't have a national housing policy in this country and we should," "We're probably one of the few OECD [Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] countries that don't have one."
TheTyee.ca June 2013

Budget 2017 includes new national housing strategy. Canadian Finance Minister Bill Morneau handed down a budget Wednesday, March 22 that includes a new $11.2 billion national housing strategy 
Business Vancouver March 22, 2017

The evidence on how well countries are prepared for the digital economy is rather disturbing. The OECD’s Survey of Adult Skills (PIAAC) suggests that more than 50% of the adult population on average in 28 OECD countries can only carry out the simplest set of computer tasks, such as writing an email and browsing the web, or have no ICT (Information and communication technologies) skills at all. Only around a third of workers have more advanced cognitive skills that enable them to evaluate problems and find solutions (OECD, 2013). As a result, many workers use ICTs regularly without adequate ICT skills: on average, over 40% of those using software at work every day do not have the skills required to use digital technologies effectively (OECD, 2016a). Skills for a Digital World OECD December 2016

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Let's look at some bullet points and their sources:

The U.S. advanced industry platform has thinned out substantially and inordinately, so that less than half as many large metro areas have the density of advanced industry activity that they had in 1980. That means that on balance many fewer U.S. metropolitan areas now have the dense supplier bases and deep pools of technically relevant workers necessary to support new advanced industry growth.

That’s a problem. In an era when clustered capabilities matter as much as labor or energy costs, the United States has a lot of work to do to rebuild its network of regional industrial ecosystems. 

Reshoring: Why It’s Not Easy
by Mark Muro and Siddharth Kulkarni, October 3, 2014

By 2016, corporations in the U.S. and Europe are expected to move an additional 750,000 business services jobs to low-cost geographies. This would bring the total of offshored jobs in finance, procurement, HR, and IT to 2.3 million – or one third of all jobs in these areas. 

While nearly three-quarters of a million jobs is significant, the speed at which these jobs leave the U.S. will begin to level off in 2014 and slow considerably after 2016. According to the Hackett Group, “of the 5.1 million business services jobs remaining onshore at U.S. and 
European companies in 2012, only 1.8 million could be moved offshore – and 750,000 of those will be gone by 2016.”

Offshoring? Reshoring? Nearshoring? How will global mobility change in the next 10 years? Report by Graebel, September, 2012

The snapshot view (bottom panel on the chart mashup above) on December 1st 2012 shows that there were 338,221 Temporary Foreign Workers in Canada, up 235% from 101,078 on December 1st, 2002. But the calendar view shows that the number of temporary foreign workers grew from 181,794 in 2002 to 491,547 in 2012 (170% increase); although a double count could occur if a short-term worker returns home and then comes back for another temporary position, but it does reflect the growing number of temporary workers who are in Canada for more than a year. 

Inter-company staff exchanges or workers brought in under trade deals like the North American Free Trade Agreement are exempt from the LMO process (Labour Market Opinion), ie: The company opinion is: "We have to hire this foreign worker because we don't have a local worker to fill the vacancy".

The federal government also shortened approval times in some cases from five months to five days.

The jump in low-skill entrants to Canada comes at the same time that preliminary estimates show a decline in the total number of temporary foreign workers admitted from January to March 2014. That decline, though, is the result of a significant drop in the number of highly skilled temporary foreign workers granted entry. The low-skill group, meanwhile, grew across all categories, for live-in-caregivers, seasonal agricultural workers, and the low-skill pilot program that includes restaurant and hotel workers among others. 

Canadian Employment Minister Jason Kenney offered an extensive defence of the vast majority of the program, arguing that legitimate exchanges of labour in a global economy should not be curtailed because of a "small number of problems".

Everything you need to know about Temporary Foreign Workers
by Bill Curry, The Globe and Mail, June 24, 2014.

Numbers of low-skilled temporary foreign workers rose despite...
by Joe Friesen, The Globe and Mail, October 27, 2014.

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Hypothesis 1.
Robots will bring manufacturing back to the rich countries as machines are replacing workers and the cost of labour will not matter much.

In the Great Recession of 2008 we see a drop in offshoring activity in the US and Europe. But the activity quickly rebounded, increasing faster than before the crisis.

Hypothesis 2.
Intelligent machines will replace smart people rather than increase the demand for skills (capital bias rather than skill bias technical change) and as a result the relative price for skills (the skill premium) will decline.

The trend in the U.S. skill premium since 1999 has been almost flat suggesting that capital-bias technology has been driving this trend.

As the demand for skills declines, the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers will decline as well.

Since the 1980s, the share of income going to labour has declined in all rich countries. It is now at about 58% of GDP. It used to be 70%.

It may well be that the ‘war for talent’ and the scarcity of human capital is an issue of the past.

Globalisation and the Rise of the Robots
by Dalia Marin, November 15, 2014

Left, Right or Down

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Deep and Persistent Wealth Inequality in Canada
Broadbent Institute September 2014

The Fading Redistributive Impact: Inequality and Poverty After four decades of relative stability, income inequality in Canada surged upward in the latter half of the 1990s. Between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, inequality increased more in Canada than in other OECD countries, and the redistributive impact of the tax-transfer system in Canada declined (OECD 2008, fig. 4.7). As we saw at the outset, by the mid-2000s, the redistributive impact of Canadian taxes and transfers was among the smallest among OECD countries (OECD 2011, 271).

The big surge in market income inequality began during the recession of the early 1980s and continued until the end of the 1990s. Rising market inequality reflects several distinct but powerful trends. Most attention has focused on the stunning rise in the proportion of income captured by the top 1 percent of income-earners, reflecting changing norms about compensation for the highly paid (Saez and Veal 2005; Fortin et al. 2012). The share of income captured by the top 1 percent is now approaching the levels reached in the “Gilded Age” of the 1920s and the Great Depression of the 1930s, generating an intense debate about the division between the rich and the rest, which was highlighted by the Occupy Movement in 2011. 

However, other trends have also mattered. One is the loss of solid middle-income jobs as a result of a combination of technological change, outsourcing, and declining unionization. According to one analysis, “the young and the poorly educated have borne the brunt of these forces, but significant numbers of those previously in the middle and lower middle of the occupational skill and wage distribution have also been adversely affected” (Fortin at al. 2012, 133). 

Finally, social changes have been important. Women and men increasingly choose spouses with similar educational levels, a process known as marital homogamy, or educational assortative mating. This trend tends to increase family income inequality as high-income earners increasingly marry each other and lower-income earners do likewise. Figure 1.1 captures the impact of these wider trends, demonstrating the strong rise in the real income of families at the 80th and 90th percentile, compared to the stagnation in the incomes of families in the middle and lower levels of the income distribution.
Read the whole Broadbent Institute study with charts here.

Bill Maher - Wealth Inequality in America

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"This is the basic insight: Software is eating the world. The Internet has now spread to the size and scope where it has become economically viable to build huge companies in single domains, where their basic, world-changing innovation is entirely in the code. We’ve especially seen it in retail — with companies like Groupon, Zappos, Fab." Marc Andreessen Wired interview April 24, 2013

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs
By David Rotman on June 12, 2013, MIT Technology Review

A less dramatic change, but one with a potentially far larger impact on employment, is taking place in clerical work and professional services. Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved analytics—all made possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap computing power and storage capacity—are automating many routine tasks. 

Countless traditional white-collar jobs, such as many in the post office and in customer service, have disappeared. W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s intelligence systems lab and a former economics professor at Stanford University, calls it the “autonomous economy.” It’s far more subtle than the idea of robots and automation doing human jobs, he says: it involves “digital processes talking to other digital processes and creating new processes,” enabling us to do many things with fewer people and making yet other human jobs obsolete. Full Article Here

"Job Switching" from I Love Lucy
Aired September 15, 1952 on CBS TV

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More and more major businesses and industries are being run on software and delivered as online services—from movies to agriculture to national defense. Many of the winners are Silicon Valley-style entrepreneurial technology companies that are invading and overturning established industry structures. Over the next 10 years, I expect many more industries to be disrupted by software, with new world-beating Silicon Valley companies doing the disruption in more cases than not.

Many people in the U.S. and around the world lack the education and skills required to participate in the great new companies coming out of the software revolution. This is a tragedy since every company I work with is absolutely starved for talent. Qualified software engineers, managers, marketers and salespeople in Silicon Valley can rack up dozens of high-paying, high-upside job offers any time they want, while national unemployment and underemployment is sky high. This problem is even worse than it looks because many workers in existing industries will be stranded on the wrong side of software-based disruption and may never be able to work in their fields again. There's no way through this problem other than education, and we have a long way to go.

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