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-intervie.....te-insider

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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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“At last the swimmers bring nose plugs along as part of thier gear.”

How many swimming events do you think there are at the winter Olympics?

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http://www2.macleans.ca/2010/0.....ea-of-debt

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Go ahead, walk along the beach, have a lie down, enjoy.

Do any of the athletes staying at the Olympic village know about the toxic sweage and sludge that pours from 26 water outlets into False Creek ‘when it rains” Nice view eh? LOLOLOLOLOLOLOL!!!!!!

At last the swimmers bring nose plugs along as part of thier gear. Or do noseplugs come with the free condoms in every room?

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“So we make less, pay more taxes, save less, and buy more stuff…”

So, let’s see if I can look at this mathematically…

LOWER Incomes + HIGHER taxes + LOWER savings + HIGHER expenses = HIGHER real estate costs.

That is,

2+2+2+2=60.

Makes sense to me.

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Right. The same people who refused to pay $275 a night will pay a year’s mortgage to a condo owner. Smart bull…

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“That said, there will likely be some Olympic bargains in the next few days. Resellers secured blocks of rooms for specific periods and now have a few rooms here and there for a night or two. So, McColl speculates that prices could dip to as low as $49 a night because resellers would rather recoup something than nothing”

Let’s hope so see some of these “resellers” (aka speculators) get royally fucked.

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http://www.vancouversun.com/tr.....story.html

They say that all the rooms in Vancouver, Squamish, and Whistler are booked, and if you don’t want to sleep on the streets you had better commit NOW at a price of $400-$500 a night. This of course contradicts information in the same article, that the cruise ship wasn’t able to sell rooms at $275 a night, as well as what I’ve heard third hand, that there is still plenty of rooms in Whistler, let alone Vancouver.

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http://www.vancouversun.com/ne.....story.html

What the state of denial ‘over everything’ in this province has caused is a society teetering on the edge of destruction. The state of whining about the ‘bad things’ while having your head up your ass has developed a perfect opportunity for the government to mislead, misguide, misdirect and misinform a public who is willing to swallow the party line and think it’s thier own idea.

The government has trained the weak minded like dancing chimpanzees to react on cue to every phony program thats levelled on the weak psyche of a gullible and insecure immigrant population. These people don’t realise that these ’social norms’ have only been designed to separate people into uni-thinking constituencies.The way people react for the most part has all been nothing more than a successful ‘advertising campaign’and people have swallowed it hook, line and sinker.

You are right its a ‘recipe for disaster’.

I remember writing copy for a local politician and I asked him, “What type of people are you trying to reach?” He said ” The ones that are around room temperature”. Of course referring to the average persons IQ.

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But that’s a minor quibble. Disaster is indeed on the way. Just take a look at Figure 8 in the Urban Futures report. Although it ends at 2001, BC’s savings rate has dropped even lower since.

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