July 23, 2021 | A Gray Rhino in China Could Rock the World
Hilliard MacBeth Author of When the Bubble Bursts: Surviving the Canadian Real Estate Crash
China has a property bubble second to none in the world. Evergrande is the second largest property developer in China and one of the largest in the world.
Could Evergrande’s troubles burst the Chinese property bubble?
Source: Macmillan Publishing, 2016
Michele Wucker wrote the book on gray rhinos, called “The Gray Rhino: How to Recognize and Act on the Obvious Dangers We Ignore”.
A “gray rhino” is defined as a “high impact, highly probable threat that has been neglected.”
July 16, 2021 | OPEC Faces an Existential Threat
Hilliard MacBeth Author of When the Bubble Bursts: Surviving the Canadian Real Estate Crash
OPEC failed again to reach agreement among its members and others to increase the supply of crude oil, a failure that risks an even greater surge in the price of oil which could trigger a worldwide recession.
Five of the last six recessions have been preceded by a spike in the price of crude oil. The one exception was the recession in 2020 caused by the pandemic of SARS-CoV-2.
Will OPEC get its act together in time?
The price of crude oil does not have the impact that it had in the 1970s when OPEC had the power to bring entire economies to the brink of disaster with price hikes caused by supply cuts.
July 9, 2021 | Canadians Need Wishful Thinking to Believe in the Housing Bubble
Hilliard MacBeth Author of When the Bubble Bursts: Surviving the Canadian Real Estate Crash
Canadian housing is expensive. Household debt in Canada is at record levels. And yet there is still enthusiasm about buying more real estate, and very little fear of a crash.
Why are Canadians so complacent about houses?
Canadians buying real estate have a very positive view about real estate prices. They have little or no fear, or they would not be buying real estate.
Here are some things that most Canadians believe:
One, house prices always rise. But prices have fallen in Canada several times, most recently in the early 1990s. People believe this because it has been so long since the last crash.
July 2, 2021 | Wilful Blindness and money laundering
Hilliard MacBeth Author of When the Bubble Bursts: Surviving the Canadian Real Estate Crash
“Wilful Blindness”, by Sam Cooper, describes how Canada has become a prime destination for money laundering. The book, released in 2021, ranks as a best seller for its entertaining and shocking descriptions. However, the reader is forced to ask uncomfortable questions about Canada.
Why have Canadians allowed their country to become a hiding place for dirty money?
“Money laundering was the shared interest in Vancouver. But something else was definitely happening. The Big Circle Boys and Chinese intelligence players had started with casinos. And they moved into real estate and finance, Canada’s soft spots for economic infiltration.”
Conclusions
Peter Brown and Peter Timmerman argue that mainstream economics is an ‘orphaned discipline’. It is founded, they claim, on a “dated and unrevised metaphysical and prescientific vision that is “incompatible with what we know about the universe and our place in it (Brown and Timmerman, 2015). Looking at free-market theory in the context of the modern understanding of evolution, this assessment rings true.
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Adam Smith’s concept of the invisible hand was a plausible hypothesis when it was proposed more than two centuries ago (Smith, 1776). Given the state of knowledge at the time, it seemed possible that self-interest, if properly channeled, could benefit groups. But as our knowledge of evolution has progressed, this hypothesis has grown steadily less plausible. The problem is that the major transitions in evolution show a pattern that is the opposite of the invisible