There’s People Going On Foreclosures Already And Homes Are Not Selling And If They Are Selling, They’re Selling Very Cheap

‘Some sellers have already bitten the bullet and dropped their asking price…A businessman who’s made his fortune from recycled shopping bags has listed his Rose Bay mansion at a $20m discount from last June. Frank Qiang Geng, who was an economics professor in Asia before creating his sustainable materials business, and Juanjuan Zhao had $75m hopes when the modern waterfront trophy home with gun barrel views at 12 Dumaresq Rd was quietly listed back in June. It now has a $55m guide via Michael Pallier of Sotheby’s and Brad Pillinger of Pillinger. They’re motivated sellers, having bought the Point Piper mansion Rockleigh for close to $85m’

That’s a mighty a$$ pounding there Frank.

Families staying in Mass. shelters must be in U.S. legally, governor’s proposals say

Families staying in Massachusetts emergency shelters must be in the U.S. legally and must also undergo a criminal background check before staying at shelters, the governor said Wednesday.

Those are among the “significant changes” that Gov. Maura Healey proposed to the state’s Right to Shelter law on Wednesday amid a migrant crisis in Massachusetts.

News of the proposed changes broke after a Dominican national living at a state-run emergency family shelter in Revere was arrested last month for allegedly having an assault rifle and five kilograms of suspected fentanyl at the shelter.

Leonardo Andujar Sanchez, 28, a citizen of the Dominican Republic, is facing federal and local charges following his Dec. 27 arrest. He is charged by federal criminal complaint with one count of possession with intent to distribute more than 400 grams of fentanyl and one count of being an alien in possession of a firearm who has entered the U.S. unlawfully, Acting U.S. Attorney Josh Levy earlier said. He remains in custody.

And in May, a migrant was indicted for raping a 15-year-old girl at a Rockland hotel being used an emergency shelter in March.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/families-staying-mass-shelters-must-200903124.html

San Francisco Hit by Tech Struggles, High Housing Costs

The loss of tech workers in particular looks to be one reason why the San Francisco metro area fell sharply year over year in an annual ranking of America’s Best-Performing Cities compiled by the Milken Institute.

The City by the Bay came in at No. 126 overall among large metro areas, taking a steep dive from 27 in 2024 and 35 the year before. In other past versions of the rankings, it topped the charts at No. 1.

Maggie Switek, a senior director of research at the Milken Institute and lead author of the analysis, says in a statement that a slowdown in high-tech job growth during 2023 and early 2024 weighed down the San Francisco area. And thanks to “slower wage growth, high housing costs and considerable income inequality” in the area, she says people have left “to look for more equitable access to economic opportunities in other cities across the U.S.”

A nearly 8% drop in information sector jobs from 2022 to 2023 contributed to San Francisco’s plummet: The area came in dead last among 200 cities assessed on a measure of overall job growth between those two years, and was a not-much-better 131st on an assessment of growth spanning 2018 to 2023.

More recently, federal data shows the San Francisco-Redwood City-South San Francisco area had 6.2% fewer workers in the information category as of November compared with a year earlier.

“The tech share of employment in California has fallen quite rapidly over the last few years,” says Julia Pollak, chief economist at ZipRecruiter. “One [reason] is the movement of tech companies away from the state and the city. One is the movement of talent from the area.”

That type of downturn – coupled with only 2% wage growth from 2022 to 2023 – was a key ingredient in San Fran’s recipe for rankings disaster, alongside its infamously high housing costs. Its 65% share of residents spending less than 30% of their income on housing was good for just 153rd overall.

Chris Thornberg – founder of Beacon Economics and a former director of the Center for Economic Forecasting and Development at the University of California-Riverside – says it’s important to put San Francisco’s woes in perspective. For one thing, while he acknowledges the high cost of housing – which he attributes to a lack of supply – Thornberg points out that the San Francisco area is home to some of the highest-income counties in the country.

“Tech has been this bust over the last couple of years,” Thornberg admits, but he says that going back to 2010, the Bay Area had about 300,000 jobs in information technology. That rose to around 600,000 before a recent drop that brought it down to about 550,000.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/san-francisco-hit-by-tech-struggles-high-housing-costs/ar-AA1xiO4S

Trump’s tariffs are the price Canada must pay for freeriding on defence

Canadian political leaders have reacted to Donald Trump’s tariff threat with a stubborn lack of understanding about why the U.S. president-elect keeps targeting his country’s friendly neighbour. They still seem genuinely perplexed by Mr. Trump’s seemingly anachronistic concept of international trade, which they see as rooted in 19th-century mercantilism.

This helps explain why most of them are still expounding on the win-win virtues of Canada-U.S. free trade, despite Mr. Trump’s endless protestations to the contrary. They still seem to think that he is simply misinformed or has a shaky grasp of economics.

What Mr. Trudeau and most provincial premiers still do not seem to get, or are unwilling to concede, is that the Ricardian economic theory – which posits free trade between countries is always mutually beneficial and which guided U.S. policy in the pre-Trump era – has been abandoned for the foreseeable future in Washington, and not just by MAGA Republicans. Support for open trade has evaporated amid mounting evidence that it has undermined U.S. national security interests.

Canada is now facing an existential threat to its economy, if not its sovereignty, as Mr. Trump threatens to punish countries he considers to be freeriders. “They don’t essentially have a military. They have a very small military; they rely on our military,” Mr. Trump said of us last week. “It’s all fine, but they’re going to have to pay for that.”

His threats are not rooted in vengeance or ignorance. They are backed up by recent research that challenges the longstanding consensus about the benefits of open trade for the United States. These studies argue that the United States has upheld the international trading system at considerable costs to its own economy and national security.

Because of its status as the world’s reserve currency, the U.S. dollar has been overvalued, undermining the competitiveness of American manufacturers. To make matters worse, some of the very countries benefitting from an overvalued U.S. currency to flood the U.S. market with their products also shirk their NATO obligations. And Canada leads the pack.

“America provides a global defence shield to liberal democracies, and in exchange, America receives the benefits of reserve status – and, as we are grappling with today, the burdens,” Stephen Miran, set to become chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA), wrote in a November paper. “This connection helps explain why president Trump views other nations as taking advantage of America in both defence and trade simultaneously: the defence umbrella and our trade deficits are linked, through the currency.”

Mr. Miran’s theories are intricately laid out in his paper, which was published before his nomination as CEA chair. There is not enough space here to describe them in detail. But suffice it to say, he sees tariffs as one way for the U.S. to recoup the cost of providing the U.S. defence umbrella to allies that fail to pull their weight in NATO.

“One can imagine a long list of trade and security criteria which might lead to higher or lower tariffs, premised on the notion that access to the U.S. market is a privilege not a right,” Mr. Miran wrote in his paper. Among them: Does the country “pay its NATO obligations in full?” Does it “support or oppose U.S. security efforts in various theatres?” Or do its leaders “grandstand against the United States in the international theatre?”

Canadian politicians offering token incremental spending on border security or threatening retaliatory tariffs on orange juice still fail to get it. It is going to take much more to satisfy or scare Mr. Trump. The trade-security paradigm has shifted. Our leaders should have seen it coming.

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-trumps-tariffs-are-the-price-canada-must-pay-for-freeriding-on-defence/

Ahead of Trump presidency, U.S. banks abandon Mark Carney climate initiative

“Right here, right now, is where finance draws the line,” proclaimed Mark Carney, the UN special envoy for climate action, in 2021, on stage at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow.

More than 160 financial institutions signed onto a kind of climate finance super-group known as the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ). At the time, Carney — who’s now an expected contender for Liberal leader — called it a watershed moment for the energy transition.

But for some of those banks, it appears the moment has passed.

Parts of the UN-sponsored initiative — originally designed to get banks aligned on and sharing investment practices for net-zero goals — are seeing notable dropouts. One offshoot, the Net-Zero Banking Alliance (NZBA), has seen every major U.S. bank quit in the span of the last month. The latest, JPMorgan Chase, offered no reason but said it “remain[s] focused on pragmatic solutions to help further low-carbon technologies while advancing energy security.”

Despite the NZBA subunit growing to more than 140 banks — holding trillions of dollars in assets that experts say will be needed to transition away from environmentally damaging fossil fuels — there are now fears these departures will spur a larger exodus, including from Canada’s major financial institutions.

Though none of the departing banks offered a reason for leaving, climate finance experts pointed to the elephant in the room.

“All the U.S. banks are running scared of Trump 2.0,” says Paddy McCully, a California-based environmentalist and senior analyst at the French non-profit Reclaim Finance. “Their fear over being attacked by Trump is much greater than their climate commitment, so they all ditched the NZBA.”

Recent years have seen a backlash against ESG investing — which follows environmental, social and governance principles — with U.S president-elect Donald Trump actively campaigning against it.

There has also been a lawsuit and probes led by Republican lawmakers against giant investment firms like BlackRock. They allege these climate initiatives are anti-competitive, by pressuring the coal companies in the firms’ portfolios to reduce their output in order to meet climate goals. That legal action was enough for BlackRock to announce its departure from another GFANZ offshoot, the Net Zero Asset Managers Initiative.

The point of voluntary initiatives like the NZBA is to co-ordinate and share best practices to harness all that buying power from banks, focusing it on getting the world’s economics to net-zero emissions by 2050.

But in the years since joining such initiatives, some experts say the complexity of the task has sunk in.

“Progress has been tinted,” says Diane-Laure Arjaliès, at Western University’s Ivey Business School, “because there were new forms of climate exposure … new carbon emissions that were not really anticipated. So for them, right now, it’s extremely difficult to commit to net zero.”

https://www.cbc.ca/news/climate/carney-esg-climate-finance-1.7428281

Justin Trudeau’s Performative Self-Regard

The Liberal Party has held power in Canada for 68 of the past 100 years. That record is a testament to the party’s pragmatism and prudence. A satirist once mocked William Lyon Mackenzie King, the most enduring of Liberal prime ministers, for supposedly believing: “Do nothing by halves which can be done by quarters.” Not all the Liberal leaders were as very cautious as King, but almost all of them absorbed his lesson: Don’t overdo things.

Until recently, the Liberals rarely deviated from King’s guidance. The one major exception occurred during the prime ministership of Pierre Elliott Trudeau, Justin Trudeau’s father. In 1980, the elder Trudeau was returned to office after a brief spell in opposition. The previous year, the Iranian revolution had caused a geopolitical crisis that spiked oil prices worldwide. The elder Trudeau convinced himself and his inner circle that the opportunity had now come to build a state-directed energy economy. His new government fixed prices, expropriated foreign holdings, and taxed producers to subsidize consumers.

This rattletrap project soon collapsed into economic ruin. The Liberals were crushed in the following election, in 1984, losing 95 of their 135 seats in Parliament.

Pierre Trudeau himself had retired just ahead of the implosion. For decades afterward, the 1984 defeat revived Liberal prudence: Don’t overdo things. When the Liberals returned to power in 1993, they delivered middle-of-the-road economic policy. When they lost power again, in 2006, they did so not for want of moderation, but because of a classic Canadian scandal of patronage and kickbacks in government contracting.

Canada is a country that does not reward imported ideologies—the nation is too riven by its own native fault lines: French versus English, resource producers versus industry and finance, rural versus urban, central Canada versus the Atlantic east and the prairie and mountain west. The successful Canadian politician must bridge those divides. The work of doing so is never easy. If a would-be leader makes the mistake of adding too many borrowed ideological isms, the already difficult becomes practically impossible.

Enter Justin Trudeau. Trudeau gained the leadership of the Liberal Party in 2013. His rise coincided with a sharp turn in U.S. politics. During Barack Obama’s second term, American liberals shifted in a much more radically progressive direction on issues of race, gender, immigration, and identity generally. Exactly why the shift happened cannot easily be explained, but it can be accurately dated. Trayvon Martin was killed by a neighborhood patrol in February 2012. After Eric Garner was choked to death by police in July 2014, and Michael Brown was shot in Ferguson, Missouri, in August 2014, the first Black Lives Matter protests and riots broke out. Social-media use intensified the new dynamics of online activism: The most striking early Twitter mobbing erupted in December 2013. By the early Donald Trump years, polling found that white liberals expressed more progressive views on race than actual members of the minority groups those liberals supposedly championed. Detractors named this progressive veer “the great awokening.” Trudeau absorbed the turn, and rapidly came to personify it.

Trudeau won a majority in the election of 2015: 184 of the 338 seats in Parliament. He won nearly 40 percent of the popular vote, a creditable plurality in a five-party system. Somewhere along the way, however, the playbook that warned Don’t overdo things got lost.

On issue after issue, the new Trudeau government implemented progressive ideas adapted from American activists, typically with harrowing consequences. In Canada, the federal government has a large role in criminal justice. The Trudeau government enthusiastically mimicked U.S. ideas about restorative justice. Canada’s incarceration rate dropped from about 86 per 100,000 adults in 2013–14 to about 72 in 2022–23. Over that period of nearly a decade, Canada’s rate of violent crime surged by 30 percent. From 2014 to 2022, the rate of homicides spiked by 53 percent. Residents of the greater Toronto area now share horror stories of violent home invasions. Invaders are typically seeking to grab keys to expensive cars. Toronto contractors now do a lively business in automatic driveway bollards designed to deter thieves from driving right up to the house and being able to make an easy getaway.

In 2018, the Trudeau government legalized the sale and distribution of cannabis. Enforcement of laws against the possession of harder drugs relaxed too. British Columbia currently permits personal possession of less than 2.5 grams of almost any drug, including heroin. In 2021, Ontario courts dismissed 85 percent of all drug-possession charges before they came to trial—this compared with only 45 percent of charges dropped pretrial in 2019, prior to a new policy directive in 2020.

Opioid-overdose deaths in British Columbia reached a new peak of 2,500 in 2023. Canadian cities—once famously safe and orderly—are now crowded with homeless addicts. In the three years from 2020 to ’23, Vancouver reported a more than 30 percent increase in homelessness. Vancouver’s permissive policies and mild weather have lured thousands of people who are vulnerable to addiction to a city notorious for Canada’s most expensive housing. The grim spectacle of people lying unconscious on streets, of syringes and needles discarded in parks and public places, has earned Vancouver the unenviable title of “fentanyl capital of the world.”

The Trudeau government faces its gravest problem because of Canada’s poor economic performance under his leadership. Fifteen years ago, Canada made a strong and rapid recovery from the global financial crisis. Of the Group of Seven countries (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States), Canada was the first to return to pre-crisis levels of both employment and output. But Trudeau has not succeeded so well with the crisis that erupted on his watch. Measured by growth in GDP per capita, Trudeau’s Canada has posted some of the worst scores of the 38 most developed countries both before the coronavirus pandemic and after.

The Trudeau government has tried to accelerate weak productivity growth by a lavish surge in federal spending and a massive increase in immigration.

Canada under Trudeau has pivoted from what economists call “intensive” growth (which involves each worker producing more) to “extensive” growth (which means producing more by increasing the number of workers). There are three big problems with the extensive-growth strategy.

The first problem is that it does not raise Canadians’ living standards. The country produces more in aggregate, but the individual does not, so there is no basis for paying workers more.

A second problem is that the new immigrant workers are also new immigrant consumers, who compete with the existing population for, among other things, housing. Relative to people’s incomes, housing in Toronto is now more expensive than in New York City or Miami. The nearby new metropolis of Hamilton-Burlington, Ontario, now ranks among the 10 least affordable cities in North America, as people priced out of Toronto relocate westward around Lake Ontario.

A third problem is that new immigrants may welcome Canadian opportunities, but they do not always share Canadian values. When privately reproached for the Trudeau government’s weak response to anti-Semitic outrages, his foreign minister, Mélanie Joly, reportedly replied, “Have you seen the demographics of my riding?” (Canadian electoral districts are known as “ridings.” Joly’s riding is 40 percent foreign-born, with Algeria the top source of migrants, followed by Morocco, Haiti, Syria, and Lebanon.) Since the Hamas terror attacks of October 7, Canadian cities have been disgraced by anti-Semitic incidents of accelerating violence. Shots have been fired at synagogues and schools, though mercifully nobody has been hurt. One Montreal synagogue has been firebombed twice. Police have given broad leeway to anti-Israel protests that would likely have been suppressed as prohibited hate speech had they been targeted at any other minority group but Jewish Canadians.

These specifics do not, however, quite capture all that has gone wrong for Trudeau. His party now stands at about 22 percent in the polls, six points worse than the Liberals’ share in the wipeout election of 1984. Look back through Trudeau’s personal-approval ratings, and you see a much earlier break point: the spring of 2018. Until then, Trudeau was remarkably popular, scoring a peak of 65 percent in September 2016. (The contrast with Trump probably helped him a great deal that fall: Trump was, and is, a widely despised figure in Canada.) Trudeau was still polling at and above 50 percent in the fall of 2017. Six months later, his rating had collapsed, to just 40 percent.

What changed in the spring of 2018? During the school break of that year, Trudeau took his wife and three children on an eight-day tour of India. On that trip, Trudeau and his family were repeatedly photographed wearing the local costume. Here he was, as prime minister of Canada, playing dress-up in ways that looked simultaneously foolish and patronizing, all at taxpayers’ expense.

Canadians who paid closer attention to Indian politics noticed something even more disturbing on the 2018 visit. The Canadian embassy invited a notorious Sikh extremist to its dinner honoring Trudeau in New Delhi. The invitation was rescinded and blamed on an unfortunate misunderstanding. Then it turned out that Trudeau had met with the extremist before, apparently as part of an ill-considered political strategy to woo Sikh ultranationalist votes in Canada.

At the beginning of his prime ministership, Trudeau described Canada as a post-national state: “There is no core identity, no mainstream, in Canada.” In his mind, no membrane seemed to exist between “foreign” and “domestic.” Hence his apparent belief that Sikh extremism in India might be used as a political resource in Canada.

In 2023, however, Trudeau learned that the Chinese state had been interfering in Canadian elections for some time. China was accused of funding pro-Beijing Chinese-language media in Canada, and of pressuring individual members of the Chinese Canadian diaspora. The then-leader of the Conservative Party would later estimate that the clandestine Chinese effort cost his party at least five, and as many as nine, seats in the election of 2021—not enough to change the outcome of the election, but a significant impact nonetheless. The Chinese government also allegedly intervened in the Liberal Party’s internal politics to replace a Beijing-skeptical Liberal member of Parliament with a Beijing-friendly one in 2019.

Trudeau has resigned as leader of the Liberal Party, but not yet as prime minister. The party will now choose a new leader to face the election that is expected sometime soon this year. For whoever wins the job, impending Liberal defeat seems impossible to avert. More likely, he or she will have signed up for the long work of reinvention and rebuilding. Trudeau’s successors will have to decide: Should the Liberal Party return to its historic pragmatism and prudence, or should it continue on his path of valuing declared intentions over measured outcomes?

The post-Trudeau Liberals may do well to rediscover the foundational rule of Canadian party politics: Seriously, we weren’t kidding. Don’t overdo things.

https://www.msn.com/en-my/news/world/justin-trudeau-s-performative-self-regard/ar-AA1xf1uX

‘They’re accustomed to passing inspections and doing the right thing. Now that they have to come up with all of this extra money, people are leaving, and when they leave, it’s very hard to sell the unit because of all the fees.  I have residents, older people, in tears. They’re afraid that they’re not going to have somewhere to stay when they’ve worked their entire life’

They didn’t do the right thing Rosalind as their airboxes need so much work. I realize it’s a tragic situation. That doesn’t change the facts.

‘Although he promised rental income from the properties, most buyers fell behind on mortgage payments, leading to seven foreclosures. The fraudulent activity caused multiple financial institutions to lose $1.53 million through false loan applications. In addition to the mortgage fraud scheme, Holliday admitted to fraudulently obtaining $391,869 in Paycheck Protection Program’

Almost all mortgage fraud articles now include PPP fraud as a side gig.