Juggling Dynamite

Great discussion with The Current’s Anna Maria Tremonti on the challenge of being successful both at work and caregiving.  Solutions take flexibility for both men and women.  Traditional roles and thinking tend to polarize and limit options for both.

In an article for The Atlantic magazine, Anne-Marie Slaughter describes her struggles balancing a high-powered career with raising her two sons. The story burst open the debate on the difficulties for working mothers [and fathers].

Here is a direct audio link.

Some investigative reporting from BC Business reveals illuminating facts behind the mainstream spin widely quoted from realtors that insanely expensive Vancouver properties are being purchased by wealthy migrants, mostly with cash.  Turns out–not so much…See: Who is buying homes on Vancouver’s Angus Drive.

First of all, the average income versus price info for Canada’s two most inflated markets Toronto and Vancouver, suggests markets in both cities are wildly unhinged from affordability metrics:

The average household income in Toronto’s pricey Bridle Path and Lawrence Park neighbourhoods (the equivalent of Vancouver’s west side) is $205,000 while the median selling price is $2.87 million [14x average income]; in Shaughnessy, where the average selling price in the first six months of 2015 was $6.5 million, the average household income is just over $135,000 [48x average income!!].

Here are key findings from BC Business’s look at 40 transactions along Angus Drive:

1.  Just 30% were all-cash deals. West-side Vancouver realtors say they deal almost exclusively in all-cash transactions.  Across the Lower Mainland, 20% of residential properties are purchased in cash.

2. Price increases on Angus Drive are without equal in Canada.  In one year between 2011 and 2012, property values along Angus north of 33rd Avenue increased 66%; between 57th and 33rd Avenue, 39%; and south of 57th Avenue, 33%. In Toronto’s roughly equivalent neighbourhoods Lawrence Park, Leaside and Davisville–it took 7 years to see a similar rise in prices.

3. Of the transactions analyzed along Angus Drive, 10 buyers listed on the title were identified as homemakers, 15 as businessmen and 16 were a combination of the two; two were students, two were doctors, one was a media agent, while one property was owned by a numbered company registered at the same address as an immigration lawyer.

Take your friends and family and go and see The Big Short this holiday season. Even if you have read Michael Lewis’s excellent book already, see the movie for some entertainment and further enlightenment. And then ask yourself and everyone else that you know:

“Why are these felonious banks not punished as felons? Why are they allowed to continue to perform fiduciary duties for pension funds? Why is a felon like Citigroup C not banned from lobbying legislators and regulators, and writing legislation, which it did in 2014, unless and until it has changed the culture that led to the criminality?

Why isn’t more transparency insisted on? Why aren’t customers of JPMorgan Chase JPM and Citigroup made regularly aware that they are doing business with admitted felons? Just as sex offenders are required in the public interest to disclose their history so that the public can protect itself, why aren’t banks that have admitted criminality required to post prominent notices in their branches and on their websites that they are admitted felons, at least until they have rooted out the incentives that have caused this criminal behavior?”

–See The Big Short: was it greed or accounting rules.

We cannot be distracted from the reforms needed in this foundational area. Capital is finite and needed in the real world and is now broadly captured and controlled by a handful of admitted criminals posing as ‘advisers’.  In every way that we can we must vote with our money by moving our business and assets away from convicted felon institutions who have already admitted multiple times that they cannot be trusted and are out for their own profits at all costs to everyone else.

Until we demand reform and personal punishment and accountability for the banksters nothing changes, and we the people, will continue to suffer catastrophic financial cost. We simply cannot afford to continue this way.  And we know how to fix this.  We cleaned this cartel up once before in the 1930’s.  Yes we can.