turar
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Posts posted by turar
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Thanks Alek and gokou. I was looking for Alberta, but from what it seems, the information is only available to the owners.
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In the US, there are offices of real property appraiser/assessor, usually at county or municipal level. They all have websites with public info on each real estate property in the jurisdiction -- prior sales, appraised value, ownership, number of bedrooms/baths, etc. In Canada, it seems that this info is not public. Is that correct, or am I not looking well enough?
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"By contrast, other countries have lesser-known histories. For example, it took the U.K. much longer to recover from the world wars. Its diminished role after the collapse of the British Empire and the complicated bureaucracies of the colonial system slowed the U.K.'s growth immeasurably. According to the authors, problems with defense spending, labor, productivity and investment plagued the British economy and markets until the mid 1970s.
The U.S., on the other hand, suffered relatively little disruption to its stock market during the world wars and didn't have the prolonged declines that many of the European and Asian markets experienced. In fact, the United States' economy largely benefited from the wars - successful companies such as General Motors and IBM thrived as a result. At the same time, many other economies suffered great losses. For example, according to Phillipe Jorion and William N. Goetzmann in their article "Global Stock Markets In The Twentieth Century" (1999), the Japanese stock market saw a 95% decline in real returns between 1944 and 1949! The German market also suffered devastating losses. In this context, the U.S. market's success seems to be an exception, which the previous lack of data for other countries may have obscured."
For anyone interested, this is the paper mentioned in the quote above:
http://faculty.fuqua.duke.edu/~charvey/Teaching/BA453_2004/GJ_Global.pdf
Going through the graphs and tables at the end is quite interesting.
Germany had annual real returns of 1.21% from 1921 to 1995, without dividends, and 4.83% with dividends. Japan: -0.81% (!) [1921-1996], I'm assuming without dividends. Quite a few other countries had negative annualized returns over much of the 20th century. Enough for me to pause and reflect on my previously held assumptions.
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All the resources spent for war could have been used for more productive uses, so that's a kind of broken window. And while the destructions of the others allowed the US to dominate more relatively, the whole world including the US might have been better with more peaceful trade between more florishing (rather than destroyed) economies since economic growth isn't a zero-sum game.
Also, I think it's all part of a bigger "free market" vs "planned economy" argument. During WW2, the government took over much of the economy in terms of demand. Was that good or bad for the prosperity? It's hard to say. Today, China's "hybrid" economy is still largely planned, at least compared to the US, yet it has been growing and prospering like crazy.
The Cold War actually diverted a huge amount of resources towards "the military industrial complex", which, by your argument, is not the most productive use. However, it gave rise to all the innovation that we're still enjoying today. Think of NASA, or DARPA (the inventor of the Internet) -- these all were made possible by the Cold War, and were publicly funded.
Yes, you can argue that it's possible all that innovation could have been somehow developed privately without the government intervention or the Cold War, but I'm not buying that yet. I mean, look at the past 20-30 years, there weren't many fundamental innovations coming out of private sector that weren't already based on government-backed research of the Cold War era. And the excesses of financial bubbles and bursts of 2000 and 2007-present don't necessarily back the point that peaceful, non-military investment always puts the resources to the "most productive use".
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All the resources spent for war could have been used for more productive uses, so that's a kind of broken window. And while the destructions of the others allowed the US to dominate more relatively, the whole world including the US might have been better with more peaceful trade between more florishing (rather than destroyed) economies. But we'll never know. It's not as simple as making up an alternative scenario in your mind that sounds plausible; it's just as impossible to create truly realistic alternate histories as it is to predict our future.
This kinda interested me more, so I googled for a bit. Check this article out: http://www.investopedia.com/articles/basics/06/alookback.asp
The US stock market performance in the 20th century is an anomaly:
http://i.investopedia.com/inv/articles/site/CT_ALookBack_2r.gif
http://i.investopedia.com/inv/articles/site/CT_ALookBack_3r.gif
"By contrast, other countries have lesser-known histories. For example, it took the U.K. much longer to recover from the world wars. Its diminished role after the collapse of the British Empire and the complicated bureaucracies of the colonial system slowed the U.K.'s growth immeasurably. According to the authors, problems with defense spending, labor, productivity and investment plagued the British economy and markets until the mid 1970s.
The U.S., on the other hand, suffered relatively little disruption to its stock market during the world wars and didn't have the prolonged declines that many of the European and Asian markets experienced. In fact, the United States' economy largely benefited from the wars - successful companies such as General Motors and IBM thrived as a result. At the same time, many other economies suffered great losses. For example, according to Phillipe Jorion and William N. Goetzmann in their article "Global Stock Markets In The Twentieth Century" (1999), the Japanese stock market saw a 95% decline in real returns between 1944 and 1949! The German market also suffered devastating losses. In this context, the U.S. market's success seems to be an exception, which the previous lack of data for other countries may have obscured."
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I don't know, I hear that a lot, but it sounds like the broken window fallacy...
Well, like I said earlier, there wasn't a war on US soil, i.e. there was no "broken window" to begin with, so at least for the US, this fallacy wouldn't apply. Pearl Harbor damage was insignificant on the scale of WW2, and Hawaii didn't become a formal part of the US until 1959 anyway.
But just looking at the outcomes, the US emerged as the only economic superpower, and one of the two overall superpowers. How did the world look prior to that? Japan was an Empire, controlling Korea, Taiwan, half of China, and pretty much most of Far East. German Empire was a huge powerhouse as well. The UK, which also suffered significant WW2 destruction, also was an empire controlling a big chunk of the world. After the WW2 they all had to give up most of their "holdings".
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To be fair, WW2 was never fought on US soil, and US has gained a lot economically in the aftermath of the war, because of the war. I wonder if the same analysis can be done on old German or Japanese newspapers, where cities including hundreds of thousands of civilians, as well as a lot of industrial/commercial targets were obliterated, and whether the conclusions will be the same.
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The most important things in life are free aren't things.
;)
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One thing that I think more of us could do is update existing threads. The Investment board has so many great ideas, but some of them have fallen to page 5 despite being as attractive (or more) as the stuff on page 1.
Maybe Sanjeev could make it so that more threads are shown on one page than already are, so that one doesn't need to click to the next page as often as currently.
You can change it yourself under your profile options: http://www.cornerofberkshireandfairfax.ca/forum/profile/?area=theme
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Off top of my head, PG, KMB, CL, CLX, Publix (private), In-N-Out Burger (private), CMG, SBUX, Subway, etc. Come to think of it, some of these are not THAT expensive.
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Thanks writser!
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What is everybody using for keeping a watchlist? Excel spreadsheet, an online portfolio simulator, anything else? What are the good services?
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Buffett and Munger are worth paying for. I've read all of Jim's letters and while they are a good read, I wouldn't pay for them.
He's definitely an odd character.
Anyone who wants to read his thoughts and strategy on investing in U.S. real estate rentals only need go to the financial webring forum and read the thread there. Plenty of great insights, all free.
Do you have a link to the thread by any chance?
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I don't blame him for renouncing his citizenship, but to say that the US had little to do with creation of Facebook is a stretch. I think it had a lot to do with Facebook becoming what it is, from early education of the founders, to providing "ground zero" (Harvard campus), to a place that made its growth possible -- Silicon Valley. There are very few other places like that.
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And then there's an officially recognized religion of file-sharing in Sweden, called Kopimism. :)
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When I look at these Countries, I see absolutely nothing special, with the exception that 4 of them were some of the easiest Countries for the Nazi's to occupy with almost no resistance (that is another thing too, atheist societies tend to have less heart in battle, because war is so illogical isnt it?).
Yeah, and when the only formally atheist nation in the world (Soviet Union) was later invaded by the Nazis, Germans got their asses handed to them on the plate. Not to mention that Europe was probably a lot less atheistic in 1939 than it is now.
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I've had a similar problem last year, but ended up doing it on my own. If you're Canadian resident for tax purposes AND with US income that needs taxes paid to the IRS, I may be able to help a little bit.
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I'm a bit surpised given their culture and rewards that they are able to attract top engineering talent.
Engineers are attracted to cool technologies, interesting projects and challenging problem sets. There was a lengthy discussion on an engineer-heavy forum earlier last year comparing Google and Amazon cultures, which might be interesting to some here. Several former Amazon employees shared their views: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3101876
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I'm also curious about this. I have requested the same thing with my brokers, but it's very sporadic. I do receive all of the proxy materials, but annual reports come only for a couple of companies. The rest don't seem to bother (?).
Shorting the Housing Bubble in Canada
in General Discussion
Posted
Aren't those 3 housing most of Canada's population though? Edmonton is not too far from Calgary in terms of real estate prices.