My wife and I are both enrolled in one of these plans so I wonder how likely we are to ever get anything out.

Municipal pensions are an obligation of the BC Crown, not individual municipalities. Municipalities in BC can go bankrupt (as they can in the US), but the Crown cannot.

The Crown can in theory disavow its obligations by legislation, but that would be getting pretty extreme.

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In BC municipal pensions are tightly regulated at the provincial level and the kind of pension crisis he talks about cannot happpen.

I'm curious – do you mean that the pensions are regulated so that they can't easily crater (e.g. from bad investments) or that if they do crater the provincial finances won't be impacted? (Or both?) My wife and I are both enrolled in one of these plans so I wonder how likely we are to ever get anything out. The annual newsletter says "Everything is fine!" which just makes me even more skeptical. Since we're fiscally cautious (to a fault) we're not expecting to get anything.

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http://pragcap.com/an-interview-with-a-chinese-re…

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Absolutely correct. The only mission for private companies is to make money, be it media organizations, health insurance companies, hospitals, schools.

But if the only business of a private company is to provide information to sophisticated customers, who need to know the real facts and are smart enough recognize the real facts, and the business does not have conflicts of interest, it will deliver the facts.

Thus The Economist, which is independently owned, was the only large circulation business publication to correctly call the global housing bubble in 2005.

Note by the way, that all of the big-business funded think tanks and university "joint institutes" in the US either openly denied the bubble or ignored it – which has also been the case this side of the border. The people who correctly called the bubble were the much-disparaged "ivory tower" (i.e. disinterested) academics such as Robert Shiller et al.

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Find it at

http://seattlebubble.com/blog/

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Sorry for my comment at #7 like anyone else I am also learning the fact quickly.

Thanks everyone!

Please countinue……

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"Never forget, News Media’s first mission is NOT to keep the public informed. It’s first, last and only mission is to earn money."

Absolutely correct. The only mission for private companies is to make money, be it media organizations, health insurance companies, hospitals, schools. Which is fine as long as we're aware of it. But, what has made the situation worse the last copule of decades is that there is a gaping divergence between the long-term interests of the owners of these private companies (i.e., the shareholders) and those who run the company on a daily basis (thanks to stock options, incestuous boards of directors, etc.)

It's a strange kind of capitalism where there are no capitalists.

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Of course not. Mass media is never to blame, at least that's what the newspapers, television and radio always inform me.

Why not run an article titled, "The news media dropped the ball on the housing bubble, why it's going to cost you a bundle, and how to unsubscribe from your local newspaper." over to the editor of The Province and see if they'll print it!

Never forget, News Media's first mission is NOT to keep the public informed. It's first, last and only mission is to earn money.

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