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”

Much ado about Air Canada’s ‘crisis’ – The Globe and Mail. i don’t really understand how company sponsored pensions can possibly work.

What Does Your Credit-Card Company Know About You? – NYTimes.com. Here’s the best quote of the article:

“[A Canadian Tire VP's] measurements were so precise that he could tell you the “riskiest” drinking establishment in Canada — Sharx Pool Bar in Montreal, where 47 percent of the patrons who used their Canadian Tire card missed four payments over 12 months. He could also tell you the “safest” products — premium birdseed and a device called a “snow roof rake” that homeowners use to remove high-up snowdrifts so they don’t fall on pedestrians.”

my personal credit crisis – nytimes.com. the chief economics reports for the times in washington writes about his disastrous subprime mortgage. i felt sick to my stomach reading this. the other solid financial rule i learned from the article: never ever ever ever get divorced.

FRONTLINE: the madoff affair. as usual, frontline manages to reveal an angle on the story that i never heard anywhere else.

Investors behaving badly — Canadian Capitalist. “while the S&P 500 has returned 8.35% over a 20 year period ending in 2008, the average equity investor earned just 1.87%, which was less than the inflation rate of 2.89%. Bond investors fared no better. They earned returns of just 0.77% compared to 7.43% for the index.” Summary of a great report about average investors buying and selling at the worst times.

globeadvisor.com: The manager who gave back his fees. Chou funds is returning the majority of their management fees for one fund for the last 6 years because of it’s underperformance.

Turns out that the majority of Pro athletes go broke after retirement. “By the time they have been retired for two years, 78% of former NFL players have gone bankrupt or are under financial stress. Within five years of retirement, an estimated 60% of former NBA players are broke”