CARPE DIEM: The Higher Education Bubble: It’s About to Burst. now that’s a crazy graph.

It’s 2010 and Canadians pay the highest cell phone bills in the world | Wirelessnorth.ca. who doesn’t love a graph of average annual cell phone bill as a percentage of GDP per capita versus cell phone penetration.

ING DIRECT Canada: Chequing. ING launched a fee-free chequing account. Free email money transfers too. Maybe this will put some pressure on the big banks in Canada.

Op-Ed Contributor – Universities Are Heading Toward Academic Bankruptcy – NYTimes.com. holy shit those are some big numbers.

Taschen, Kraken and More Publish Luxury Limited-Edition Books – WSJ.com. we’re talking really luxury.

The Charity 100 | MoneySense. some really interesting data on how well run different Canadian charities are run. Some really terrible results like the Heart And Stroke Foundation of Ontario : only 55% of money raised goes to programs and they spend $6 to raise every $10.

Buffett’s bet: Hedge funds can’t beat the market – Jun. 9, 2008 . 10 year $1M bet that the S&P500 beats a pool of hedge funds after fees.

HSBC Business Direct: HSBC Bank Canada. a no fee chequing account for small businesses in Canada. holy crap, i just saw a flying pig!

The Way We Live Now – Walk Away From Your Mortgage! – NYTimes.com. about people and companies “strategically defaulting”. via amr.

Not a Tax Grab After All: CCPA report on HST | Canadian Capitalist. nice commentary on the sheer hysteria around the HST and a report for the Center for Policy Alternatives calling it a good policy change.

Exhibit: Iranian banknotes uprising | Payvand.com. people are writing on bills in green ink in protest. the post implies it’s effected enough of the money supply that it can’t be removed. via ram.

How to buy in to Warren Buffett – The Globe and Mail. they’re splitting the Berkshire B class shares 50-to-1.

Got Perfect Credit? You Could Be Charged For It! – wcbstv.com. BofA and Citigroup are trying out charging fees to credit card customers with perfect credit. I’m so glad the government bailed out both of those companies. via jody.

Mint CEO Aaron Patzer on Startups – Vimeo. 20 minute talk about the last 3 years of mint.com. interesting talk as he had just sold mint to intuit for $170M and he uses their actual numbers for costs and equity shares. I though the most informative slide was about their projected revenue per user based on cost-per-acquisition deals (jump to 14:00 for this).

Audio: Jim Rogers answers your questions – The Globe and Mail. my question was the first one asked which was kinda odd to hear.

Your Money – The Higher Lifetime Costs of Being a Gay Couple – NYTimes.com. those are some pretty large numbers. boo america.

fed talk

Kevin Warsh, who is a Governor of the US Federal Reserve did a speech last week in Chicago that had one very interesting sentence…

“I would hazard the view that prudent risk management indicates that policy likely will need to begin normalization before it is obvious that it is necessary, possibly with greater force than is customary”

Oh snap! That was fed-speak for “nice fuck up Greenspan“. But why is this interesting? Well, as someone who thinks they might be obtaining a mortgage in the next year it definitely hammers home that if you can lock down a low fixed rate mortgage, now is the time to do it. There’s no deals to be had on variable rate mortgages at the moment and this announcement really means that the Fed might raise rates faster and sooner than we’ve become accustomed too. I realize that Bank of Canada bank rates aren’t in perfect lock-step with the Fed but, if you exclude the early 90s, you’ll definitely see a pattern.

On this note, The Canadian Capitalist blog had a great post (and follow-up) about how the historic savings of variable over fixed rate might not apply in this time of historically low interest rates.

New York Restaurant Loses Its Appetite for Cash – WSJ.com. only takes credit and debit now. nice little add-on video about online currencies as well.

How To Brace Your Portfolio for Inflation – WSJ.com. or more so, hyper-inflation. not a ton of options for average folks though he does mention the option of grabbing a 10-year fixed rate mortgage for 5%.

Talking Business – Poking Holes in a Theory on Markets – NYTimes.com “Our default reflex is that the world knows what it is doing, and that is extravagant nonsense”