Juggling Dynamite

Americans are less healthy, more indebted and more frustrated with their government and prospects.  We look forward to a mean reversion (up) of this trend in the future.  But first, some major overhauls are needed in several key areas

Chances are, if you live in the U.S., you feel worse today than you did 10 years ago. Don’t worry, it’s not you. This is a national problem: America’s rank on the happiness scale is falling.

When it comes to happiness, the U.S. ranked 19th among the 34 countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation & Development in 2016, down from third among 24 countries on a similar measure in 2007, according to the World Happiness Report, produced by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and funded by the Ernesto Illy Foundation.  Here is a direct video link.

Canada also slipped in the rankings this year to 7th overall from its past 5th or 6th spot.

Norway nabbed the top spot out of 155 countries, followed by Denmark (last year’s no. 1), Iceland, Switzerland and Finland. The United States fell to 14th place, continuing its slide down the list in recent years. See World Happiness Report 2017.

More bank employees and customers are coming forward with stories of unethical practices and harmful financial recommendations dubbed ‘advice’ in Canada’s big banks. None of this is new, similar practices were rampant in the 1920’s leading up to the financial crash and depression thereafter.   As well as in the Savings and Loan Crisis of the 1980s, that led to more than 1000 bank failures and several hundred arrests and bankruptcies.

But beware, non-bank financial conglomerates will be using this wave of bank revelations to promote their services as ‘independent’ because not bank owned.  Make no mistake:  the lion share of other mutual fund, insurance, broker/dealers dispensing financial products and recommendations in Canada today, are just as aggressive, sales-focused, self-serving and financially harmful, as the banks.  In many cases, their fees (embedded and otherwise) are even higher than in bank products.  What makes banks particularly harmful, is that they are given privileged inside access to see the cash we hold in our bank accounts and the equity we may hold in our homes, by virtue of them being our bank.  On top of that, we the taxpayers, are expected to backstop banks who get into financial trouble through reckless financial practices.  So they literally hold us financially hostage, in the present system.

This problem of profit-maximizing practices, parading as professional advice is across the financial sector and worldwide. It is even present in many buy-side or fiduciary asset management companies, where the firm collects a higher fee percentage on client funds that are allocated to equity and other so called ‘hi-yield’ products like preferred shares and corporate debt, rather than government bonds, GICs, cash and the least risky deposit instruments.  The urge to collect higher fees, often naturally pushes advisors to recommend a higher risk exposure than may be desireable for a client’s capital.  This is especially dangerous, late in each market cycle, where like now, asset valuations are at historic highs, and ‘buy and hold’ firms mandate a perpetual exposure to risky assets despite the high probability of deep capital drawdowns that take years to recover, if they do at all, in the client’s finite lifetime.

The first part of the fix is to stop financial product underwriters and sellers from calling themselves advisors, while separating taxpayer-backed deposit-taking institutions, from those who create and sell securities.  This separation was done in the 1930’s and then rolled back again as memory faded in the 1980’s and ’90’s.  A very costly mistake, the re-consolidation helped usher in the Great Financial Crisis of 2008, and the global debt crisis that has compounded in severity since.  This is why we must reinstate Glass-Steagall divisions as already proposed in 2013.

 In emails to Go Public, past and present call centre employees for TD, RBC, BMO and CIBC (none from Scotiabank) said they’re expected to use the same high-pressure sales tactics as those their branch colleagues recently revealed to CBC News — and face the same threat of being fired if they fail to consistently upsell customers. Here is a direct video link.

Also the CBC did another radio call in show on unethical sales tactics in Canada’s big banks. Here is a direct audio link.

The European union was envisioned by its banker architects as a union of currency, enabling a financial transaction/leverage superhighway that extracted profits for a few multinational conglomerates.  The model greatly enriched and empowered the banksters over the past 20 years, while helping to billow a massive global debt bubble that now cripples most households and countries.  Debt saturated, meaningful financial recovery going forward, depends on new ideas:  not adding more debt and increasing profits for the few, but rather increasing efficiency and reducing prices to increase quality of life and disposable cash flow for consumers everywhere.

The three main constants of household spending are shelter, food and transport.  Implicit in all of these are energy costs.  In lowering energy costs (full costs that include pollution, climate degradation, water shortages and illness), we directly improve the health and stability of life on earth for humans.  A great many people are now seeing that implicit in this goal, is enabling the collection of all kinds of clean energy directly where it is consumed, as well as seamlessly sharing excess via intercontinental power grids that upload energy from millions of producers and sources so that it may be drawn down wherever needed.  No more waste and burning off excess power in some regions, while others go without.  The Trump government may be trying to pull America back to the energy dark ages, but Europe and most of the world is seeing the light.  See: Europe’s renewable energy revolution:

This is just part of a quiet revolution in renewable energy across Europe. An international power grid is gradually developing, using power interconnectors to trade surplus energy across national electricity networks, allowing big wind power producers in northern Europe, for example, to trade electricity with large solar energy generators in southern Europe.

The UK has already plugged into the network through interconnectors to Ireland, Belgium, the Netherlands and France, and there is a proposal for a highly ambitious project to connect Britain to Iceland’s abundant supply of geothermal and hydroelectric power using a subsea cable around 1,000km long.

This international power grid gives more reliable supplies, helping to smooth out the intermittent power produced from renewables such as wind and solar energy. It also gives Britain more secure power sources as old nuclear and out-of-favour coal plants are shut down.

Also see Let’s get real about alternative energy for some context on the growth potential for alternative fuels and technologies.  This is a massive, productive, smart investment area that will create excellent jobs and world-improving efficiency and growth.  And in accordance with Moore’s Law, output and efficiency are leaping every year.  All win, win.