Timing & trends

Investor James Pattison, owner of the Guinness Book of World Records, has emerged asCanada’s richest person after new information revealed that David K.R. Thomson, heir to the Thomson media empire, owns a smaller stake in his family’s investment company than previously reported.

Pattison’s namesake conglomerate has more than a dozen businesses, including media distribution, grocery stores, outdoor advertising and auto dealerships. He has a fortune of $9.5 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

…read on to find out Canada’s Richest Woman HERE

The cost of living in the U.S. was unchanged in November from a month earlier, showing inflation is making scant progress toward the Federal Reserve’s goal.

No change in the consumer-price index followed a 0.1 percent decrease the prior month, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The median forecast of 83 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a 0.1 percent advance. The coremeasure, which excludes food and fuel, rose 0.2 percent.

 

Canada intends to lay claim to the North Pole as part of a bid to assert control over a large part of the resource-rich Arctic, Foreign Minister John Baird said on Monday.

Baird said Canada had filed a preliminary submission to a special United Nations commission collecting competing claims and would be submitting more data later.

The move could raise tensions with Denmark and Russia, both of which also look set to lay claim to the North Pole on the grounds it lies on a continental shelf they control.

“We have asked our officials and scientists to do additional and necessary work to ensure that a submission for the full extent of the continental shelf in the Arctic includes Canada’s claim to the North Pole,” Baird told reporters.

Canada, Russia, Denmark, Norway and the United States are all keen to control as much as they can of a region the U.S. Geological Survey says contains 30 percent of the world’s undiscovered natural gas and 15 percent of oil.

A Russian submarine planted a flag on the North Pole sea bed in 2007.

“Obtaining international recognition for the outer limits of our continental shelf … will be vital to the future development of Canada’s offshore resources,” said Baird.

“Canada is going to fight to assert its sovereignty in the north but I think we will be good neighbors in doing so.”

Russia, Canada and Denmark all say an underwater mountain range known as the Lomonosov Ridge, which stretches 1,800 km (1,120 miles) across the pole under the Arctic Sea, is part of their own landmass.

Baird said Canada needed more time to file a final submission to the U.N. commission because it had not had time to fully map the area around the ridge.

(Reporting by David Ljunggren; Editing by Cynthia Osterman)

TORONTO (Reuters) – Sales of existing homes in Canada dipped in November from October as a surge in autumn sales spurred by rising mortgage rates abated, the Canadian Real Estate Association said on Monday.

The industry group for Canadian real estate agents said sales activity was down 0.1 percent last month from October.

While actual sales for November, not seasonally adjusted, rose 5.9 percent from a year earlier, CREA said activity was sharply lower than just two months earlier, when the prospect of rising mortgage rates spurred home buying.

“National sales activity in November stood 3.4 percent below the peak reached in September, providing further evidence that activity in the later summer and early fall was likely boosted by home buyers with pre-approved mortgages at lower than current interest rates jumping into the market before their pre-approvals expired,” CREA said.

The prospect of rising mortgage rates typically steals demand from the future, a drop now in evidence.

But economists said they expect some bounce back in activity because bond yields, which set longer-term mortgage rates, have eased, before the overall market manages a soft landing.

“We expect activity to grind higher in the months to come following the recent decline in bond yields that will help to restore a modest amount of affordability relative to the summer,” David Tulk, chief Canada macro strategist at TD Securities, said in a research note.

“But taken in conjunction with the accumulated impact of tighter mortgage regulations, higher yields expected over the course of 2014 will limit the upside for the housing market. Instead, we expect that the market is destined for a soft landing and will have less of a role to play in supporting economic growth in a recovery that will become more reliant on exports.”

 

…read page 2 HERE

2014 Will Move Us Closer To The End

Posted by ZeroHedge

on Tuesday, 17 December 2013 15:00

america-us-sinking-shipThe fraud that has been the US government and its effects on the Potemkin economy should be obvious by now. Yet our politicians continue to pretend the economy is growing and recovering. It is not. It is in a death spiral that their interventions caused and continue to feed.

The presentation below is another one from Gordon T. Long. This one includes Charles Hugh Smith as his guest. Both are worthwhile listening to, especially in this presentation.

What is discussed is expectations for 2014. The problems that may surface this coming year have their roots decades before. Each problem results from prior government attempts to stop normal economic corrections. Each was designed to stimulate the economy to avoid the necessary adjustments. Their effectiveness short-term was politically acceptable and was achieved by distorting prices, interest rates and lending standards. The intent was to send false signals to economic actors, to encourage them to behave in ways that helped short-term results but were harmful long-term.

….continue reading HERE

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