Liberty

This feels toppy: http://m.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Was-last-weekend-s-Real-Estate-Wealth-Expo-the-2538443.php#photo-2669675

I really enjoyed the dinner when I went in 2013, thank you for your hard work organizing it. I'm not really the traveling type, unlike many others, though, and with a young kid, I haven't been able to make in the past few years. This year I was hesitating between it and CSU agm. I ended up deciding on CSU because I've never been before, but I'd be sad if the dinner disappeared because I'm definitely considering going in coming years and it's a quality event and a good chance to meet some of the great people from this community you've built.

https://medium.com/@mrtsta/walking-on-thin-ice-time-for-torontos-real-estate-bubble-to-pop-62f7456821b8#.8epwriz42 http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/toronto-housing-bmo-td-1.4028032

Marc Cohodes interview on Vancouver and HCG:

Via @ac_eco: http://www.ryerson.ca/content/dam/citybuilding/pdfs/2017/CBI%20POLICY%20PAPER-In%20High%20Demand-March20171.pdf

Many places have it. It's called "Moral hazard".

this reminds me of something... Ah yes! http://blogs.wsj.com/marketbeat/2011/02/17/mozilo-on-countrywide-better-performance-than-warren-buffett/

http://www.antimoneylaunderinglaw.com/2017/03/us-rates-canada-once-again-as-a-major-money-laundering-country-in-annual-report.html

Am I the only one who thinks this is an idiotic analysis? It is playing on fears instead of credible analysis. In 2000 certain industries were absurdly high (internet, telecom, and some other mega caps) so the indexes were overvalued but that had nothing to do with the median stock valuation. There were hundreds of dirt cheap "old economy" stocks in 2000. 2007 was different but the crash was not about over valuation but a largely unforeseen housing crash that damaged everything else. One of his metric is also based on revenues, which over long periods overlooks how the economy's composition has changed to include industries that have structurally higher margins (ie. software).

"Range ratio since 1980."

House-prices-to-rent ratio, with range since 1980.

Interesting read by the anonymous author known as @Jesse_Livermore on Twitter: http://www.philosophicaleconomics.com/2017/03/a-value-opportunity-in-preferred-stocks/ (It's not because I post it that I necessarily would do it myself or would do everything this author does -- he's smarter than I am, and looks more with Macro than with single businesses -- but it's still thought provoking)

http://www.torontohomes-for-sale.com/4a_custpage_2578.html https://twitter.com/stephaniefusco/status/838111439034417153

I read it. Part of the problem here is I don't have a time machine. Now I am a loser in life in many ways and so I have this tendency to believe the world is a worse place now than it was before. I am almost certainly wrong though because I don't have any experience of the past. That said my feeling is that in science things are worse today than they used to be. Actually I would make it even broader...throughout all institutions things are worse. People are more dishonest, more selfish, bigger assholes. And the money corrupts everything. The personal morality is gone. I mean there is this different group morality that is better like on race and gender. But on the very basic things like how you treat others, whether you are honest...something has gone wrong. Science started out different. It was an amateur endevour. There was little incentive to be dishonest. There just weren't big rewards in science. Benjamin Franklin didn't play around with kites to win a research grant...he did it because he thought it was fun and really cool. Americans were very lucky. You had WW2 and the influx of European scientists from societies that were at the height of their cultural and intellectual sophistication. These guys didn't just know science...they knew history, philosophy, literature. The had a fully grounding in the Western classical tradition. And though Christianity was dying...there was a Christian morality at the personal level that was still there. You lucked out in getting all the best Europe had to offer. And then on top of that you heavily funded science. And even better you had this influx of poor, striving immigrants from Eastern Europe (I am thinking of Russian Jews) from which you get your Feynman's, Glashow's, in the second generation. So immediately post WW2 you have the perfect mix and you get some amazing science. But its almost like the very thing that enable you to produce so much (massive research grants) is also the thing that corrupted the foundations the success was built on (scientific morality, intrinsic interest, wide intellectual education, strong philosophical background). And so we go from guys like Schrodinger, Godel, Einstein, Heisenberg, Fermi who could discuss Emmanuel Kant in one sentence and Green's functions in the next. To Feynman, who though he had no philosophical understanding, did at least understand physics and mathematics thoroughly...not just the math but also the history of physics. And finally you get to the present day where a researcher is very narrowly educated, highly technical and not only doesn't know anything outside his narrow sub-specialty but often doesn't even know the history of his own discipline. But worse he is a careerist. He doesn't learn how to do good science. He learns how to play the game. How to suck up the right people. Develop the right network. Play dirty. And follow the prevailing fads. The culmination of all this is the corrupt asshole university professor. He has an army of graduate students. He has thousands of publications. He has an extensive social network of people he has collaborated with and they all help each other: they only cite each others papers...never anyone outside their network, they try to prevent any paper from competing groups from getting through peer review (because of course they have friends on the editorial boards of major journals), in peer review they often push authors to cite people from their network even though the citations aren't relevant, they follow the latest fad, they overhype their research and so it goes. Its all a big game. And often the worst rise to the top. This isn't just true in science though. In the criminal justice system the game is the same. Prosecutors don't care about justice, they care about how many convictions they get. Here is an example of the type of thing I am talking about. My friend submitted a paper to a conference proceeding. When they got to the conference, the same paper with different wording but exactly the same values, same idea was presented before them. Someone had given their paper to a competing group which had plagiarized the results. Complete plagarism. My friend wasn't able to present. The supervisor of my friend then spent about two years workings slowly through back-channels to get this asshole bigshot professor to stop plagiarizing my friend's work. Now you may ask: Why the hell didn't he just accuse the big shot professor of plagarism. The reason is that he professor was very powerful. He had friends on grant committees, conference heads, editorial boards etc. So the professor was afraid of blow back and he had to proceed very slowly and carefully. For a long time they couldn't get published in major journals because the big shot had friends at the journals. We had to publish in other journals. As I said, sample bias.

The issue isn't about vaccines, it is a broader issue about the state of scientific research. Rukawa has posted some above in his post, highlighting this broader issue. The original article contains other examples in the same vein (e.g. http://enveurope.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s12302-014-0014-5). In terms of vaccines, we (along with most rational individuals) both agree that the net benefits outweigh the individual risks. The issue is that there appears to have been instances where evidence was removed from studies suggesting that risks do in fact exist: https://www.nsnbc.me/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/BSEM-2011.pdf (evidence begins on pg. 3) http://web.archive.org/web/20140826171415/http://www.translationalneurodegeneration.com/content/pdf/2047-9158-3-16.pdf The issue of the links I posted was mostly vaccines. As for science in general, see my first post in this thread for my opinion.

Wow!

I'm not saying that's not possible, I'm saying show me the (credible) evidence. So far I haven't seen it, while I see massive, massive, massive evidence that the world is much, much better thanks to vaccines and that they are incredibly safe compared to even things like seatbelts and stairs. And I don't even believe that vaccines are 100% safe. It's possible that some people have rare allergic reactions or whatever. But they're much, much, much safer than not being vaccinated. And most of the "controversies" that the anti-vaxxers still harp about have been debunked long ago, they just never update to new evidence so it's pointless (ie. some ingredient that they don't like gets removed from some country decades ago, no statistical change happened, showing that the ingredient wasn't causing whatever they're blaming on, etc. Or they keep spreading the misinformation that vaccines actually inject people with functional viruses and that you can catch the disease from the vaccine, like it's the middle-ages or something). People love to talk about the incentives of scientists in keeping things quiet and having a massive conspiration, etc. These people have no understanding of how things work, and of how hard large-scale conspirations are to actually keep quiet for long when the data is open. Scientists love to prove others wrong (maybe not always within the same group, but between competing organizations, or young blood vs. old guard), and anyone who proved either a big conspiration or proved that something is a big problem and should be changed (helping make things safer for everyone) would probably get a pulitzer or a nobel, or at least high recognition. It's the non-scientific minds who dont actually understand how things work that have the biggest motivation: Fear. They used to be afraid of witchcraft, and now they're afraid of science they don't understand.

I see what kind of rhetorical trap you're trying to lay here. How many articles exist in the world? How many have you and I read? How should we allocate our time to reading? It's called a BS detector. Knowing the general arguments in favor and against vaccines/etc, and then being able to decide which makes more sense based on the evidence and reasoning, and then recognizing these arguments in the wild. Skimming a few paragraphs and seeing preposterous lies/propaganda is enough for me to stop reading further. Of course the hit rate on my BS detector isn't 100%, but in very widely scrutinized areas like vaccines, there's quite a strong consensus by people with good BS detectors. Where it gets harder is with much less scrutinized areas where the data is opaque, like companies :)

Using the best information we have at the time is not a guarantee that it's correct information, and it has never been. But understanding this doesn't mean that you should disregard the best information at the time just because it's not assured to be correct and instead just randomly guess or just believe whatever is most convenient. That's worse, not better. I think there's always been bad studies and that many things take a while to incrementally become more and more confirmed, but now with the internet, every one of these things can be spread far and wide and we get bombarded with it. 20 years ago, where would you hear about these things? You think they were covered in the evening news or the morning paper? It's a bit similar to how people think violence and crime has gone up overall because they're so much more exposed to it than before 24-hour cable news, while actual facts show that it has been going down overall. It's also a case of sample bias: If you look back, most of the crap has been forgotten and the gems remain, so it looks like before all science was great and flawless. A bit like music: The crap from the past fades, and the great albums remain, so it looks like things were better back then.. Scrutiny is good, finding mistakes is good. Let's just not draw the wrong conclusions from this. btw, that website seems like a pretty iffy source itself... http://wakingscience.com/2016/02/fluoride-officially-classified-as-a-neurotoxin-in-worlds-most-prestigious-medical-journal/ http://wakingscience.com/2017/01/vaccinate-not-vaccinate-no-longer-question/ http://wakingscience.com/2016/08/2354/ http://wakingscience.com/2016/11/vaccines-still-contributing-greater-good/ http://wakingscience.com/2017/01/3408/ http://wakingscience.com/2016/08/2-month-old-infant-suffered-apnea-died-following-8-vaccines/ http://wakingscience.com/2016/07/revealed-vaccine-ingredients-cause-tumors-grow/ http://wakingscience.com/2016/07/uncensored-truth-mandatory-vaccines-according-rob-schneider/ I would guess that the original article you linked to might be itself bogus. Ironic, maybe...

Here an hour-long Q&A with Marc Andreessen from November 2016. I think many of you might find it interesting:

Canada business investment: Canada residential investment as % of GDP: price-to-rent ratio: https://twitter.com/alex_macdonald/status/836975600535490560 https://twitter.com/alex_macdonald/status/836975071323389953 "Fun fact: Toronto's 99,000+ unoccupied homes is half the number in *all* of England." http://buff.ly/2m91Gdh

Again, to correct another misconception: all insured mortgages now have to qualify at the 4.6% posted rate, which is over 2% higher than contracted rates. Uninsured mortgages also have to qualify at the high posted rate - except for 5 year and longer terms. But yes, interest rates act like gravity on all kinds of assets - including real estate. This rule is recent, most didn't have to go through it, and qualifying at a time when they lend to everyone isn't the same as being disciplined enough with your finances to actually have the spare cash flow when the time comes... Many wouldn't qualify without the bank of mom and dad providing a down payment that they couldn't save organically. Everyone wants to focus on debt service, but in the end, the absolute size of the debt always ends up mattering...

I'm not saying that the same thing that happened in the US will happen in Canada. It's always different from one time and one place to the other. We'll see. I'm saying that houses are not good buys at any price (do we have to explain this to value investors?), and that unsustainable situations end. When houses go up in price at double-digit rates for years and years and incomes go up (if at all) at low single digits, the difference is made up by debt, that makes the situation brittle. Many people can only justify buying houses because they use assumptions about them continuing to go up in value rapidly and periodically taking equity out. What if that stops? They used to call it taking a second mortgage and it was a big deal, now it's HELOCs and it's free money that many use for consumption because they have nothing left over after paying for their 800k mortgage and ratcheted up city taxes... and they're deadly afraid of interest rates going up 1 or 2 percent.

If they invested the money that they saved by renting, they probably did better, as RE over long periods doesn't do much better than inflation and equities over time have a nice premium over that. If they decided to spend it instead, that's a different choice, the same as those who are now taking equity out of their houses via HELOCs and spending it on luxury SUVs or downpayments for their kids. Ask the people who bought in Toronto in 1989 how long it took them to get back to where they started. I'll give you a hint: The year starts with a 2. Most people do better owning their home because it forces them to save, but that's not really a thing of owning homes, you can save my while renting too. Sometimes one approach makes more sense than the other, houses are not worth owning at any price.

I think a lot of demand is coming from Asia where those prices don't look all that high. The prices I saw in the Twitter feed, while quite high by North American standards, are quite cheap compared to HK or Singapore (and many tier 1 Chinese cities are not far behind). Property taxes in major Asian cities are, however, low or even non-existent so the comparison is more complicated than that but it is entirely possible that the prices are just re-valuing to more reasonable levels. What percentage of houses in Toronto would you estimate are bought by wealthy Chinese or Singaporean nationals?