They Need $4-Million To Get Out And They’re Not Worth $4-million

‘marking the latest drama for China’s cash-starved property sector. Sunac’s Hong Kong-listed shares slumped 21 per cent to HK$1.38 at the noon break on Friday, after falling nearly 29 per cent in the morning session. The company has told some of its bondholders that it may not be able to meet deadlines for repayment on a dollar bond maturing in September’

I guess they are still playing the charade that the gringos are going to get their money back. This ‘dollar bond’ thing was hailed as yet another mastermind financial innovation at the time by globalist scum media, like bloomberg. Now everybody is fooked and they have to pay lawyers to try and get back pennies on the peso.

‘Webster last month abruptly closed the real estate business, which employed approximately 140 agents. According to the lawsuit, Webster and Success have faced ‘serious financial difficulties’ in recent years due to a slowing real estate market, outdated business model and overleveraged expenses…‘In actuality, Webster obtained these loans no different than a ‘Ponzi’ scheme as he was simultaneously embezzling over $1 million from Success’ coffers in order to fund business operations and support his extravagant personal lifestyle’

All Time High Larry.

Condo owners don’t deserve low-interest loan bailouts. It rewards bad behavior. | Letters

Low-interest loans proposal just a bailout

The editorial encouraging our Florida state government to step in and provide low interest loans to people living in condominiums that have insufficient reserves to fund long needed maintenance is rewarding bad behavior. These people and their HOAs made a series of poor decisions. Can I get a low-interest loan to fund repairs on my single-family home that I did not do because I did not want to spend my money keeping my home safe? Also, can I get some emotional support so I don’t have to take any responsibility for my selfish actions?

Yes, I know from personal experience that as we get older, life gets harder. I also know that it takes a village to raise a child and protect a grandmother. A government, on the other hand, exists to protect the commons. Our state government needs to address the property insurance house of cards and not get diverted by making laws and earmarking my tax dollars to encourage people to continue to make bad decisions.

John Peebles, North Palm Beach

https://www.yahoo.com/news/condo-owners-dont-deserve-low-183912804.html

‘What are we talking about?’ Trump’s ‘economic force’ comments cause worry, disbelief

Incoming U.S. president Donald Trump’s escalating rhetoric around implementing tariffs on Canadian products are sparking worry and disbelief, though some of the companies potentially most affected are staying quiet.

Speaking at a press conference Tuesday, Trump threatened to use “economic force” to annex Canada, while also once again raising issues with the trade deficit and saying the U.S. doesn’t need to buy Canadian lumber, dairy or automobiles.

“They send us hundreds of thousands of cars, they make a lot of money with that. They send us a lot of other things that we don’t need. We don’t need their cars and we don’t need the other products. We don’t need their milk,” said Trump to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida.

Along with threatening tariffs, Trump claimed in his press conference that the U.S. had no need for Canadian goods. He once again raised issue with the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, characterizing it as a subsidy.

“We lose in trade deficits, we’re losing massive,” he said. “We don’t need anything. So why are we losing $200 billion a year and more?” he said.

Canada’s best strategy for now is to take a “wait and see” approach publicly, while avoiding any threats of retaliation, said Fen Hampson, an international affairs professor at Carleton University and co-chair of its expert group on Canada-U.S. relations.

He said Canada benefits when it remains below the radar and does not take the bait.

“When you’re the smaller party, you don’t make threats, which first of all aren’t going to be credible because the big guy can stomp on you like a mess. So we’ve got to be a lot more nimble, we’ve got to be a lot smarter and our Prime Minister should keep his mouth shut.”

https://www.ctvnews.ca/business/what-are-we-talking-about-trump-s-economic-force-comments-cause-worry-disbelief-1.7168246

Elon Musk praises Poilievre, mocks Trudeau as he steps into Canadian politics

As a giant of industry and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk wields influence across the global economy. He’s now leveraging that success to extend his influence into the democratic process in Canada and elsewhere.

In the past week alone, Musk has dipped into Canadian politics on his social media platform several times; endorsing Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, showering him with praise, reposting his tweets and applauding his speeches and media interactions.

At the same time, he has mocked Prime Minister Justin Trudeau over his resignation, borrowing president-elect Donald Trump’s language to refer to him as a “governor.” He’s even called Trudeau an “insufferable tool.”

“It’s about positioning yourself on the global stage as a thought leader, in inverted commas, who can rise above politics but also be aligned with it when it suits him,” said Andrew Chadwick, professor of political communication at Loughborough University in the United Kingdom.

“I think with Musk [his advocacy has] become aligned with what he sees as political movements around the world that share his libertarian anti-state, anti-regulation, anti-legacy media ideology,” Chadwick told CBC News.

In Germany, Musk has endorsed the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) leader, Alice Weidel, who’s a fierce critic of multiculturalism. Some prominent AfD members have been ostracized for their failure to condemn the war crimes of the Nazis.

Last year a German court said the AfD was officially suspected of extremism, allowing the German security services to continue monitoring their activities and communications.

Musk has been accused in Germany of interfering in that country’s upcoming elections on Feb. 23 for his endorsement of the AfD and promise to host a live interview on X with Weidel on Jan. 9.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/musk-canada-poilievre-trudeau-influence-1.7426954

The great pretender: Looking back at Trudeau, we see our initial judgment of him when he first entered politics was correct

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Liberal Party of Canada was near death when Justin Trudeau took over as leader. He leaves it near death again. The years between have been a roller-coaster ride, much like his father’s time in office, from the giddy, even nauseating public and media enthusiasm of the early months to the quite unreasoning hatred his name now evokes in certain quarters.

It isn’t as if we did not know what we were getting into. More than most prime ministers, Justin (as he was often called, and is to this day) was a known quantity by the time he took office, having grown up in the public eye – twice, in fact. There was his natural childhood, much of it spent in the prime ministerial residence at 24 Sussex Drive. And there was his political childhood, as it were, between entering politics in 2008 and becoming prime minister in 2015.

Though in his late 30s/early 40s, he seemed strangely adolescent, unformed, unaware: part flower child, part dudebro. He had done little with his life before politics; certainly little that would prepare him for it. There was no evidence that he had thought deeply about any subject, and plenty of evidence that he had not, especially the peculiar public statements to which he was prone: That if he thought Canada were really “the Canada of Stephen Harper” he would become a Quebec separatist himself; that as a Liberal “of course” he preferred the country were governed by Quebeckers rather than Albertans; that the country whose government he most admired was “actually” China, with its “basic dictatorship.”

And of course there was the pouting, the theatrical head-tosses, the costume changes, the breathy displays of sincerity. But there were also, as time went on, signs of an emerging self-discipline. The celebrated 2012 boxing match with Senator Patrick Brazeau looks more bizarre and insensitive with each passing year, but there can be few figures in public life who would have gotten into that ring, or done the training for it beforehand. His handlers gradually reined in some of the self-dramatizing, trimmed his hair, gave him some talking points.

The suspicion that the whole thing was a cynical façade was reinforced by the rapidly growing pile of broken promises. The platform contained a slew of commitments – more than 350 of them, by one count – not all of them well considered or, one suspects, honestly intended. The promise of “two annual deficits of no more than $10-billion” had already become a bitter punchline by the time of the government’s first budget. The promise not to buy the F-35 stealth bomber, but to hold an “open and transparent competition” – only to buy it in the end – was another classic.

But nothing topped the Prime Minister’s spectacular backflip on electoral reform, early in 2017. No promise was spelled out more starkly, with less room for ambiguity, in the platform: The 2015 election would be “the last … conducted under the first-past-the-post system.” No, millions of Canadians did not base their vote on that specific promise. But it was there for a reason – to signal a certain idealism, even radicalism, especially tailored to NDP-leaning voters – and it is no coincidence that the government’s long descent in the polls began then.

The more ruthless and unprincipled Mr. Trudeau, notwithstanding his smiling persona, appeared to be, the more his government’s relentless pursuit of identity politics, its readiness to fire off a volley of trite social justice clichés at the least provocation, came to seem, not mere pious dogma (”Because it’s 2015″), or even a calculating sop to target demographics, but something altogether more sinister: a shield, more than a sword, providing cover for Mr. Trudeau’s own “problematic” predilections.

If, for example, you have worn blackface so many times you cannot remember the exact number – it seems to have been something of a hobby – and you are afraid it will come out some day, what better defence than to advertise your passionate commitment to racial justice at every turn? Credibly accused, in the same vein, of groping a young female reporter? Reinvent yourself as an ardent feminist. As it turns out, people will be less inclined to dismiss you as a hypocrite than to resolve their own cognitive dissonance in your favour.

It worked for a time, until at some point a lot of the things that raised doubts about Mr. Trudeau – the self-centredness, the constant desire for attention, the fake cultural sensitivity – converged. That point was the India trip, and the jaw-dropping series of costumes and performances it produced. It wasn’t exactly racist – the Indians seemed more perplexed than insulted – but it told you of the insular world Mr. Trudeau inhabited, that he could have imagined people would still find this sort of thing charming, as if it were still 2015 and not 2018.

Carbon pricing was another signature achievement, but tainted both by its timidity – carbon pricing was supposed to replace existing regulatory and subsidy schemes, not be tacked on top of them – and by the many carveouts and exemptions that were granted to particular interests, of which the last, on home heating oil, proved politically ruinous.

The alarming deterioration in the government’s finances, on the other hand, never did seem to penetrate Mr. Trudeau’s skull, and in the end cost him his finance minister.

Foreign policy, on the other hand, revealed a prime minister still in the grip of his father’s illusions, notably with regard to China. Liberals came to power besotted with the idea of China as the rising power in the world, and Canada as its beneficiary. There was talk of a free trade deal, even an extradition treaty.

That all came crashing down with the Two Michaels affair, and even more with the revelations of China’s extensive interference in Canada’s domestic politics – interference the Trudeau government seemed strangely reluctant to confront. The evaporation of the China strategy, moreover, did not appear to cause any deep rethink at Global Affairs, which spent two years failing to prepare a coherent Indo-Pacific strategy.

The rest is a blur of incompetence and futility: the rapid expansion of the civil service, yet with measurable declines in service quality (passports, anyone?); the endless bottlenecks, in things like judicial appointments, that came from flowing every decision through a clearly overwhelmed Prime Minister’s Office; quixotic policy choices like trying to regulate the global internet. All spoke of a government that emphasized intentions over action, symbols over substance, ideological hobby horses over practical improvements in people’s lives. A government that looked very much like the man who led it.

The demise of Justin Trudeau was not the product of any one thing, but of a series of incidents – the electoral reform about-face, the India trip, SNC-Lavalin, COVID and its aftermath, the triple-crisis of inflation, housing and immigration. It was the accumulating sense that he was not what he pretended to be – that what he was looked less and less like what people hoped he might become and more and more like what everybody knew he was from the start.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-great-pretender-looking-back-at-trudeau-we-see-our-initial/