Juggling Dynamite

On human rights and equality, North America leaves many countries in the dark ages in comparison, and still females in power and policy positions in business here remain outrageously under-represented, with little progress for years now.

And it’s not for lack of excellent, equally qualified and interested female candidates. We are half of the population after all, and women have been making up half of post-secondary and post-graduate students for many years now.  The divergence happens in career opportunity, income and experience thereafter.

Yes women are, so far at least, the only sex who can birth children; but barring illness or complication, most work ably right up to their due dates.  Child-rearing duties can definitely be a career challenging area–especially for women.  Yet how they are managed often has much to do with the willingness of fathers to share equally in day to day parenting duties of their kids as well.

Many dads today are, or would like to be, equally involved in raising their children where financial responsibilities, career norms and peer tolerance permits it.  Too often still, disproportionate child rearing duties default to moms less by equal choices between parents, but because women are systemically earning less than men–even for equal work–and are offered less opportunity to advance, so family financial prospects fall disproportionately on fathers.  This makes less choice for both sexes and leads to a society where duties are decided more by biology than individual merit, talent and ability.  In this, we all lose.

In business today, inequality is a self-fulfilling cultural issue, where intentionally or not, those in power seats tend to reach out to those with similar personal attributes and experience to their own. Since most are males who are not sharing equal parenting duties for their children, they tend to offer the best career opportunities to other males who are also not expecting to fulfill equal parenting duties for their children. This perpetuates the problem and tends to limit career paths, attitudes and work-life balance options for women–but also for men.

Those who think equality in the work place has been solved or is a non-issue, tend to be those who are either content with the current status quo, or who have not yet tried to step outside the established male/female roles and careers. It takes awareness, thinking and intentional effort from those both inside and outside of privileged classes in order for social evolution to succeed.  But the collective has much to gain on all fronts, when it does.

Not enough #women breaking glass ceiling. See % of female board members in yr country https://t.co/9LxczqC7jM #IWD pic.twitter.com/CYdKa6dNip

— OECD Social (@OECD_Social) March 8, 2016

Retooling and retraining oil and gas workers to refit and roll out the renewable energy infrastructure globally is the obvious solution. Good, strong, healthy, efficient growth opportunities are all around us. But people have to see it and want to evolve.  Looking backwards is a dead end.

When the oil industry is booming, everyone in West Texas benefits. But when oil prices go bust, the cheap gas comes with a human cost. An estimated 76,000 oil workers have lost their jobs in Texas and that has a domino effect in many communities. Here is a direct video link.

Relentless QE from central banks pushed borrowing rates (and thus investment yields) to all time lows over the past 5 years, and two mounting costs appeared.

One was that the world piled on trillions more in debt at every level from households to corporations and governments, leaving the economy today more levered and fragile than it was heading into the 2008 credit crisis. The second, is that the people who have savings to lose and/or manage for other people, have become increasingly more inclined to reach for higher risk securities. As this buying pushed prices skyward, capital risks surged. As with all such cycles, the longer and higher prices have climbed, the more confident and convinced people become of their investment ‘genius’.

In North America one of the areas attracting much confident capital has been high risk corporate debt and equity products focused on (can’t lose?) real estate–commercial (retail and office space) and multi-unit residential. Prices in established cities like New York, Houston, San Fransisco, Vancouver, Calgary and Toronto went wild.

The trouble is that surging investor flows have produced even more properties/supply, more leverage and increasingly weaker investment prospects.  This was always destined to end badly. The only question has been when.  And ‘when’ seems to have started.  See US Commercial Property prices drop for first time in 6-years:

U.S. commercial real estate prices dropped in January for the first time since 2010, a sign of weakening demand by investors after a six-year rally that pushed values to records.

The Moody/RCA Commercial Property Price Index slipped 0.3 percent from December, Moody’s Investors Service said in a statement Monday. The decline was led by office and industrial buildings, which each had a price drop of more than 1 percent.

“This is a significant milestone that signals that a shift in sentiment among commercial-property investors is under way,” Moody’s said in the statement.

Volatility in financial markets may be hurting real estate demand. Rates of return are falling and it’s “very difficult” to bundle and sell real estate loans, hindering debt financing for transactions, Jon Gray, head of real estate for Blackstone Group LP, said at a conference last week. His company is the largest private equity property investor, with about $94 billion under management in real estate.