The now prime minister of Canada headed the ESG there. He is also an international central banker.
lwansbrough 5 hours ago [-]
I guess we shouldn’t do anything because Brookfield exists.
weirdmantis69 5 hours ago [-]
I guess we should do stupid corrupt things because Trump exists.
lwansbrough 4 hours ago [-]
What’s Trump got to do with this?
If you invest anything in the Canadian market you probably hold some Brookfield.
Carney’s investments are in a blind trust.
What more could be done, in your view?
petermcneeley 4 hours ago [-]
Perhaps I would have simply had someone different represent Canadians.
Is this too much to ask?
givemeethekeys 3 hours ago [-]
Yes, considering everyone else was either utterly incompetent, didn't want the job, or screwed the pooch under pressure.
petermcneeley 2 hours ago [-]
Look, I checked my email everyday and didnt see anything.
lovich 3 hours ago [-]
So you were just complaining because you don’t like the guy?
petermcneeley 2 hours ago [-]
Your response is the quality of argument that I have come to expect in Canada.
lwansbrough 4 hours ago [-]
Apparently!
alexb_ 3 hours ago [-]
Wow! This guy knew a lot about working in an environmental/social/governance framework, AND he knows enough about money to have been an international central banker?
I knew Carney was great, but I didn't know he was so well-qualified too.
adjejmxbdjdn 3 hours ago [-]
Carney was the governor of the Bank of Canada through the financial crisis and Canada was one of the least affected developed countries. To be fair, Canada’s insular banking system also helped limit exposure, but Carney’s handling of the situation was good enough that the UK made him the first non British governor of the Bank of England, during which period he oversaw the whole Brexit saga, where again his handling of the UK economy was extremely highly regarded.
There are justifiable question about whether he will be a good PM but he is probably one of the most successful central bankers of all time.
While that's true, it does seem to be a strange thing to glamorize now, since as much as it was an engineering accomplishment, it was also arguably a genocidal pursuit, and it's doubtful the sort of projects the government has in mind now will be as "nation building" as expropriating the entirety of Western Canada and letting a single private entity have as much power as CPR does.
nish__ 6 hours ago [-]
Why is HN so pessimistic?
pie_flavor 6 hours ago [-]
The parent comment just says it'll perform similar to how past similarly-shaped things performed, without saying what that past performance is. If that implies pessimism, that's not HN's fault.
visceralasonia 5 hours ago [-]
I think they missed "laudable." My first read I thought it said laughable too—it's an easy misread that set a completely different tone for the rest of the comment.
nish__ 6 hours ago [-]
Give me a break.
kirubakaran 6 hours ago [-]
Is setting expectations based on track record considered pessimism?
nish__ 6 hours ago [-]
Incessant nit picking, negativity and doubt casting is my issue.
And Canada is unrecognizable these days. Why should I think past performance is indicative of future success?
jsbisviewtiful 5 hours ago [-]
> Incessant nit picking, negativity and doubt casting is my issue.
That has unfortunately been very common internet culture since 2020. It was there before the pandemic, but post-pandemic internet never recovered its full whimsy and veered headfirst into a depressive state. Probably says something about everyone's general mood.
dacox 5 hours ago [-]
As a Canadian I see little reason for optimism
slopinthebag 6 hours ago [-]
You're right, it is unrecognisable, and past performance is not indicative of future success. It will be much worse than past performance.
Sorry, not optimistic enough I suppose :(
visceralasonia 5 hours ago [-]
That says "laudable" not "laughable." They were actually complimenting the effort, even if some folks misread it
5 hours ago [-]
6 hours ago [-]
lbrito 5 hours ago [-]
It's the default for any non USA story.
5 hours ago [-]
dahdum 6 hours ago [-]
This is a great way to sidestep the political process to fund popular projects. The political constraints will ensure returns are middling, so unless they subsidize with tax breaks on dividend income I think it would be a poor commercial investment.
Whether its perfect or not, it almost has to be better than the current status quo.
onlyrealcuzzo 5 hours ago [-]
How are you going to have a Sovereign Wealth Fund when you're in debt ~300% to GDP?
Are they going to fund their "wealth" with debt?
This is an oxymoron.
You aren't "rich" if you have $1M and you owe $4M. You're a con-man living a lie that will crush you eventually.
And by the way, if you have -$3M, sorry, but you're the last person I want to invest money with...
Norway gets to have a wealth fund because they have a small population with a massive amount of oil revenue, and they aren't run by morons.
Canada only produces about 2x as much oil as Norway, but it's got 10x the population. Sorry, you can't all be rich like Norwegians unless you start pumping 5x more oil.
Things like this should be laughed off the world stage.
We live in an upside down world.
roncesvalles 5 hours ago [-]
>How are you going to have a Sovereign Wealth Fund when you're in debt ~300% to GDP?
This seems to be incorrect. Including federal, provincial and local, the debt is about 110% of the GDP.[1]
> You aren't "rich" if you have $1M and you owe $4M. You're a con-man living a lie that will crush you eventually.
I'm not sure the simile lands. If that $1M is financing a lavish lifestyle, then you are for all intents and purposes rich. As for the crushing down part, the modern economy shows us one can stay solvent longer than the market is irrational (especially true the more zeros are added to the numbers above).
badc0ffee 5 hours ago [-]
GDP isn't wealth. This is closer to making $1M/year and owing $4 million.
rogerkirkness 4 hours ago [-]
Canada has tens of trillions of dollars in natural resources it could choose to monetize at any time.
glitchc 5 hours ago [-]
GDP isn't the only measure of wealth. Canada has vast resources that act as collateral for the debt. You wouldn't be friends with a billionaire who only owns stock and lives mostly off the debt issued against that stock?
boringg 6 hours ago [-]
One of the biggest challenges is finding investable projects these days. If they put this money in as a hold to time projects well than could be a good future asset for Canada. If it ends up actually being more of a jobs production vehicle for political gain then probably less successful.
WorkerBee28474 6 hours ago [-]
If this is run anything like the CPP, it will underperform both the market and their own benchmarks yet lead to executives awarding themselves huge bonuses.
cherioo 6 hours ago [-]
That seems fine as long as they can show lower volatility than market while still being close in return?
Did they?
lesuorac 6 hours ago [-]
Why does it matter if volatility is lower than the market?
Future payments in the short term are covered by inflows.
You might as well maximize the returns now so that in the future when it's not covered by inflows you've acrewed a larger return.
akamaka 2 hours ago [-]
> Future payments in the short term are covered by inflows.
That wouldn’t work in a major depression when there is high unemployment and inflows drop.
vkou 5 hours ago [-]
> Why does it matter if volatility is lower than the market?
Because I can trivially beat the market by ~100% by going long on 3:1 margin.
The volatility is why that's a bad idea. One time out of five, the consequence of that investment strategy is 'The market had a crash and I lose everything'.
'Lol, YOLO' is not a great investment strategy for a well-ran country.
AnthonyMouse 4 hours ago [-]
> One time out of five, the consequence of that investment strategy is 'The market had a crash and I lose everything'.
Which is why that strategy doesn't actually beat the market. Keep using it for 30 years and you're bankrupt.
Whereas if you put your money in a major index 30 years ago and left it there, or even 50 or more years ago, what result? Are you even in a bad place if you put all your money into the market in 1926 and left it there for 100 years?
akamaka 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, if a retirement fund had put all their money into a stock index in 1926, it wouldn’t have been able to pay out pensions throughout the 1930s and 1940s and would have been bankrupt before the market eventually recovered.
Going full index is a great strategy for an individual person aged 20-50, but not a strategy for a pension fund which needs to continuously pay out.
jjtheblunt 6 hours ago [-]
> Future payments in the short term are covered by inflows.
is that similar to the Ponzi scheme pattern, though?
AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago [-]
Ponzi schemes always make current payments out of current inflows. The first 10 people get paid from the inflows from the next 100 people who get paid from the next 1000 people and so on, until you run out of people to sign up and the last group is left holding the bag. This is how Social Security works in the US because it started out by making payments to people who never paid in and was premised on the early 20th century fertility rate of >3.5 instead of the current ~1.6 to keep the system from collapsing, which is why the "trust fund" is running out of money -- it never had enough to cover future payments to begin with.
Whereas having individual years when the fund pays out more than it collected in interest is not a problem as long as that's not what happens on average.
jjtheblunt 4 hours ago [-]
kudos for a thoughtful and clear explanation: useful indeed as my question was genuine, not snarky.
This youtuber appears to be anti-active management. CPPIB is underperforming their own benchmarks and charging substantial active fees.
> Where 20 years ago the CPPIB had just 150 employees and total costs of $118-million, it now has more than 2,100 employees and total expenses (not including taxes or financing costs) in excess of $6-billion.
But...they don't appear to be terrible v. their peers, but that might be an indictment of pension funds.
roncesvalles 5 hours ago [-]
"We achieved superior risk-adjusted returns" as an excuse for sovereign fund underperformance is nonsense. PE (depending on how levered it is) inherently has lower volatility than buying public stocks.
If your fund gets consistently lower returns than if you had just stuck everything in a 60/40 portfolio, the whole endeavor has failed.
triceratops 5 hours ago [-]
I really like the ideal of just chucking it all in VTI (or, since it's Canada, some other equivalent). But does it still work at that scale? Or does the fund exert its own gravitational field on the index in question?
AnthonyMouse 5 hours ago [-]
The gravitational field of indexes that large is one of the reasons why it works. The stock price of a company will generally increase when it's added to a major index because there are now so many more people trying to buy it as part of the index.
The risk is nominally that if you ever wanted to move a fund that large into some other investments, the act of selling would lower the price of the assets in the fund. But that's what happens no matter what you invest that amount of money in. But then widely distributed whole-market indexes would tend to mitigate that.
The real problem with this is that it disconnects what people invest in from the fundamentals of the companies. Promising companies don't get as much investment if they're not in an index, and mismanaged companies get too much if they are.
triceratops 25 minutes ago [-]
> The gravitational field of indexes that large is one of the reasons why it works
I'm confused because my question was whether a sovereign wealth fund could move an index by too much. Not about the issues with index investing (which IMO are mostly overblown).
caminante 5 hours ago [-]
Not Canada, but Bank of Japan and the equivalent JP pension fund have juiced the crap out of domestic JP stocks with ETF purchases.
bparsons 6 hours ago [-]
Over the last decade (and even prior to that) CPPIB has been the best performing fund of its kind. National pension funds have different risk tolerances and investment guidelines that someone's personal portfolio or a family office.
Thanks to CPPIB, Canada does not have have a giant unfunded pension liability (unlike our neighbors to the south). It has been an enormous success story.
sefrost 6 hours ago [-]
Yes, far better than how the UK runs its state pension system.
The Australians seem to have the best model overall though. Mandatory payments in to private investments has made them very wealthy.
The UK system takes the national insurance contributions of workers but doesn’t invest them in anything on behalf of the individual. So despite decades of payments you technically have nothing at the end and survive on the goodwill of the government and current taxpayers. That works right now because of the population pyramid.
Canada definitely has a better system than that.
infinite8s 5 hours ago [-]
>The UK system takes the national insurance contributions of workers but doesn’t invest them in anything on behalf of the individual. So despite decades of payments you technically have nothing at the end and survive on the goodwill of the government and current taxpayers. That works right now because of the population pyramid.
That's how Social Security works in the United States as well.
sefrost 2 hours ago [-]
I believe it’s tied to your earnings in the US though, which it isn’t in the UK.
I also have a number of qualifying years in the UK when I didn’t work, and for decades you could buy a year contribution for about £150. The payout is £12,500 per year.
lotsofpulp 5 hours ago [-]
>That works right now because of the population pyramid.
Is it really a pyramid if the base is less wide than the top? I guess it would be an upside down pyramid, but not very useful for the intended purpose then.
In contrast, the PSPF (federal public sector pension) has over-performed.
m3kw9 5 hours ago [-]
different risk profile
caminante 4 hours ago [-]
They've underperformed their risk-adjusted benchmarks.
> But the CPP fund didn’t just underperform the indexes last year. It has done so, on average, ever since it switched to active management. That’s the admission you find buried on page 41 (it was on page 39 last year): since fiscal 2007, “the Fund generated an annualized value added of negative 0.2 per cent.” Compound that 0.2 per cent annual shortfall over 19 years, and it adds up to more than $70-billion in forgone income, on assets that now total $714-billion. [0]
A sovereign wealth fund makes sense if fund with profits from exploiting our natural resources.
That is how Norway did it
hvb2 5 hours ago [-]
And Norway has north of 2 trillion in that fund for about 5M people...
Like, well done. Impressive financial planning at that scale
unixhero 4 hours ago [-]
Yep. Long term greedy nation taught by the best at Goldman Sachs. Thank you guys!
incomingpain 6 hours ago [-]
A sovereign wealth fund requires surpluses to be run.
This is not a wealth fund at all. This is a debt fund. It doesnt even try to hide the debt that's drowning the federal government.
We are borrowing money to play the stock market.
Fire-Dragon-DoL 6 hours ago [-]
Doesn't that has the problem of over exposing canadians to canada economics from an enormous an investment perspective?
I guess it benefits my kids though
mapt 6 hours ago [-]
There are multiple types of sovereign wealth fund associated with taxes on resource extraction. The type you see in Norway is used to shelter the economic diversity, currency, and labor force from the steamrolling impact of the extractive industry. The type you see in Saudi Arabia, which has no such diversity and where basically all employment is tied to oil through few degrees of separation, is basically a slush fund for long-term infrastructure projects that would not otherwise be approved because of their size in relation to the secular economy, whether those are profit-generating enterprises like harbors or not-for-profit ones like roads.
Both aim to take today's windfall and spend it on something other than hookers and blow.
Norway still does have some totally unjustifiable passion projects, like the coastal highway it's building, but it's doing this from general funds to keep the wealth fund separately managed as a giant pile of investment money that just happens to belong to an investor called 'Norway', while in Saudi Arabia it is an instrument of policy.
scosman 6 hours ago [-]
I think the thesis is it's not solely about returns. Get a 7% return investing a dollar domestically, plus add a taxable dollar to economy (and some recurring benefit to tax base) beats getting a 9% one-time return investing internationally.
slopinthebag 6 hours ago [-]
Usually a sovereign wealth fund is funded by excess profits, like Norway for example. In this case, it's being seeded by $25 billion dollars of debt. Can anyone more financially gifted explain how this is any different from, well, regular government spending and money printing?
Tiktaalik 6 hours ago [-]
Yea really. Feels like a bit of a communications exercise and effort to create arms length distance from the Federal government and spending on major projects.
Now it's not the Federal government and taxpayers propping up the oil industry by buying yet another oil pipeline, but rather a "sovereign wealth fund" (funded by Canadian taxpayers).
slopinthebag 6 hours ago [-]
Yeah and like, if they want to use it for infrastructure, mining, and LNG development, isn't that at odds with retail investors who require more liquidity? Doesn't it require the fund to either hold massive cash reserves to manage redemptions or rely on government bailouts if retail sentiment sours before projects mature?
To me it sounds less like a "sovereign wealth fund" and more like a domestic infrastructure bank wrapped in populist messaging. I expect plenty of boomers to invest to "stick it to Trump", elbows up!
Tiktaalik 4 hours ago [-]
And we already have an infrastructure bank! Trudeau started it. And Carney was the financial advisor to Trudeau, so it was probably his idea too! lol.
slopinthebag 4 hours ago [-]
We do?!?!? Why don't we ever build any infrastructure with it lmao
WorkerBee28474 6 hours ago [-]
Only in that it's in a private equity fund, not one-time spending.
llm_nerd 6 hours ago [-]
>Usually a sovereign wealth fund is funded by excess profits, like Norway for example.
If Canada ran resources like Norway does, it would have an enormous "excess profit". Norway's royalty rates and "profits" are dramatically higher than Canada where decades of American psyops fooled a bunch of very foolish people that the primary purpose of Canada is to ensure maximum profits for US orgs.
But really, international economics is just mostly made up, and if enough people go along with it then it's as real as real can be.
lotsofpulp 5 hours ago [-]
>But really, international economics is just mostly made up, and if enough people go along with it then it's as real as real can be.
What is not made up is that if you need to import things from other countries, then you need to export things from your country in proportional value, or else the country as a whole loses purchasing power (i.e. gets poorer). In this case, if Canada is increasing its money supply, then the purchasing power of the currency will go down unless it correspondingly increases demand for its currency (usually by increased demand for its goods and services, including land or businesses in Canada).
llm_nerd 3 hours ago [-]
>What is not made up is that if you need to import things from other countries, then you need to export things from your country in proportional value, or else the country as a whole loses purchasing power (i.e. gets poorer).
So the US is the world's poorest nation, by far, right? Country has a two trillion dollar+ deficit, a one trillion dollar trade deficit, absolutely no end in sight of spiralling to bankruptcy (it's only getting worse), and lets the money printer go brrrr.
Most of international economics are made up, and often are nonsensical. There is no master book of records that dictates cause and effect (there simply isn't, so at best we get "but if you do this...that maybe will happen...or maybe it won't", but mostly it's people looking around and trying to figure out what other people will go along with.
lotsofpulp 3 hours ago [-]
>So the US is the world's poorest nation, by far, right?
Considering the USD still has decent purchasing power, no? The demand for US goods and services relative to other nations' might have dropped from its peak, but still considerably higher than other nations.
>There is no master book of records that dictates cause and effect
There is for simple stuff, like supply and demand. There is no way of getting around that executing a successful peaceful trade requires both parties to have something that the other wants.
On a nation state level, debt denominated in a nation's currency is more like a claim on the future productivity of a nation (since any nation can always print money or edit a digital database to satisfy its debts).
When you buy a US Treasury, you are betting that at some point in the future, the US is going to be be selling things worth having. You are not worried that your loan to the US will default, because it is trivial for the US government to repay you in USD. Your risk is that when it gets paid back, what will you be able to buy with it?
llm_nerd 2 hours ago [-]
>Considering the USD still has decent purchasing power, no?
You understand I was applying your logic, right? The US has the worst trade deficit on the planet, by a long shot. It buys far, far more than it sells. Its primary role on the planet is money printer.
>When you buy a US Treasury, you are betting that at some point in the future, the US is going to be be selling things worth having.
Again, this almost sounds sophomoric. When you buy US treasuries, you are betting that the US will still be printing money when it matures, or when you unload it earlier. It is not based on sound rational logic -- if so the country with the $40 trillion dollar debt and $2 trillion dollar deficit with the massive trade deficit -- would be already bankrupt.
I feel like I'm arguing with someone who is arguing rational economics when someone points out how farcical a stock like TSLA is. All of the hot air in the world doesn't change the fact that it relies upon a shared delusion, and everyone is playing a bit of a game of chicken.
lotsofpulp 2 hours ago [-]
>You understand I was applying your logic, right?
I am not sure what logic you are referring to. My first reply was to point out that no matter what economics are "made up", when push comes to shove, there has to be delivery of real goods and services for the charade to continue. "Enough" people won't go along with someone that doesn't result in them getting what they want, and no one wants a currency if they don't think it will get them what they want.
My second post is responding to the claim that America is the poorest country, to which it obviously isn't, since it can still buy almost whatever it wants.
Regardless of the technical details, someone who can buy something is richer than someone who cannot buy something. Maybe that is due to a shared delusion, and maybe everyone is playing a bit of chicken. Obviously, that will only be revealed in the future, but in general, that's what all sovereign nations' debt is, a "delusion" (or assumption) that the fruit of the nation's productivity will be worth having in the future.
somewhereoutth 6 hours ago [-]
I believe wealth taxes (really, wealth restitution) should go into sovereign wealth funds - not least as then the public can see how that money is working for them, and so support the continuance and expansion of such taxes.
vizzier 6 hours ago [-]
Agreed, we should also nationalise resource extraction and put the funds in there. Canadian resources should be for Canadians.
qball 5 hours ago [-]
No.
Historically, this just ends up with Toronto and Montreal (and to a more limited extent, Vancouver) treating the rest of the country as a resource colony. The pretense that consent of the governed is equally geographically distributed is, naturally, very useful to you.
If you do that again, as you did in the '60s, Canada will only be Toronto and Montreal.
contagiousflow 5 hours ago [-]
> this just ends up with Toronto and Montréal (and to a more limited extent, Vancouver)
So, where most Canadians live?
sefrost 6 hours ago [-]
There’s a reconciliation dimension that complicates that framing, at least in BC.
triceratops 6 hours ago [-]
More importantly - revenues from the funds should be used for reducing income taxes. That's how you get broad-based public support for wealth taxes.
hirako2000 6 hours ago [-]
If I understand democracies, the private sector get easy access to credit via the creation of debt. You win you win. You win we lose. but also get money invested on behalf of the tax payer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_in_C...
#1 is Brookfield Corporation.
The now prime minister of Canada headed the ESG there. He is also an international central banker.
If you invest anything in the Canadian market you probably hold some Brookfield.
Carney’s investments are in a blind trust.
What more could be done, in your view?
I knew Carney was great, but I didn't know he was so well-qualified too.
There are justifiable question about whether he will be a good PM but he is probably one of the most successful central bankers of all time.
Hopefully turns out better than BCRIC.
also why all the love for Canadian Pacific rail?
The Canadian Pacific rail connected the country east to west, was a major milestone in the country's history: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Canadian_Pacifi...>
And Canada is unrecognizable these days. Why should I think past performance is indicative of future success?
That has unfortunately been very common internet culture since 2020. It was there before the pandemic, but post-pandemic internet never recovered its full whimsy and veered headfirst into a depressive state. Probably says something about everyone's general mood.
Sorry, not optimistic enough I suppose :(
Whether its perfect or not, it almost has to be better than the current status quo.
Are they going to fund their "wealth" with debt?
This is an oxymoron.
You aren't "rich" if you have $1M and you owe $4M. You're a con-man living a lie that will crush you eventually.
And by the way, if you have -$3M, sorry, but you're the last person I want to invest money with...
Norway gets to have a wealth fund because they have a small population with a massive amount of oil revenue, and they aren't run by morons.
Canada only produces about 2x as much oil as Norway, but it's got 10x the population. Sorry, you can't all be rich like Norwegians unless you start pumping 5x more oil.
Things like this should be laughed off the world stage.
We live in an upside down world.
This seems to be incorrect. Including federal, provincial and local, the debt is about 110% of the GDP.[1]
The US has 3x more debt per citizen than Canada.
[1] https://www.imf.org/external/datamapper/GG_DEBT_GDP@GDD/CAN/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_public_debt this article says it's 57% of GDP. Where are you getting your 300% from?
I'm not sure the simile lands. If that $1M is financing a lavish lifestyle, then you are for all intents and purposes rich. As for the crushing down part, the modern economy shows us one can stay solvent longer than the market is irrational (especially true the more zeros are added to the numbers above).
Did they?
Future payments in the short term are covered by inflows.
You might as well maximize the returns now so that in the future when it's not covered by inflows you've acrewed a larger return.
That wouldn’t work in a major depression when there is high unemployment and inflows drop.
Because I can trivially beat the market by ~100% by going long on 3:1 margin.
The volatility is why that's a bad idea. One time out of five, the consequence of that investment strategy is 'The market had a crash and I lose everything'.
'Lol, YOLO' is not a great investment strategy for a well-ran country.
Which is why that strategy doesn't actually beat the market. Keep using it for 30 years and you're bankrupt.
Whereas if you put your money in a major index 30 years ago and left it there, or even 50 or more years ago, what result? Are you even in a bad place if you put all your money into the market in 1926 and left it there for 100 years?
Going full index is a great strategy for an individual person aged 20-50, but not a strategy for a pension fund which needs to continuously pay out.
is that similar to the Ponzi scheme pattern, though?
Whereas having individual years when the fund pays out more than it collected in interest is not a problem as long as that's not what happens on average.
https://youtu.be/DQgqEFOc894?t=267
> Where 20 years ago the CPPIB had just 150 employees and total costs of $118-million, it now has more than 2,100 employees and total expenses (not including taxes or financing costs) in excess of $6-billion.
But...they don't appear to be terrible v. their peers, but that might be an indictment of pension funds.
If your fund gets consistently lower returns than if you had just stuck everything in a 60/40 portfolio, the whole endeavor has failed.
The risk is nominally that if you ever wanted to move a fund that large into some other investments, the act of selling would lower the price of the assets in the fund. But that's what happens no matter what you invest that amount of money in. But then widely distributed whole-market indexes would tend to mitigate that.
The real problem with this is that it disconnects what people invest in from the fundamentals of the companies. Promising companies don't get as much investment if they're not in an index, and mismanaged companies get too much if they are.
I'm confused because my question was whether a sovereign wealth fund could move an index by too much. Not about the issues with index investing (which IMO are mostly overblown).
Thanks to CPPIB, Canada does not have have a giant unfunded pension liability (unlike our neighbors to the south). It has been an enormous success story.
The Australians seem to have the best model overall though. Mandatory payments in to private investments has made them very wealthy.
The UK system takes the national insurance contributions of workers but doesn’t invest them in anything on behalf of the individual. So despite decades of payments you technically have nothing at the end and survive on the goodwill of the government and current taxpayers. That works right now because of the population pyramid.
Canada definitely has a better system than that.
That's how Social Security works in the United States as well.
I also have a number of qualifying years in the UK when I didn’t work, and for decades you could buy a year contribution for about £150. The payout is £12,500 per year.
Is it really a pyramid if the base is less wide than the top? I guess it would be an upside down pyramid, but not very useful for the intended purpose then.
https://www.populationpyramid.net/united-kingdom/2026/
> But the CPP fund didn’t just underperform the indexes last year. It has done so, on average, ever since it switched to active management. That’s the admission you find buried on page 41 (it was on page 39 last year): since fiscal 2007, “the Fund generated an annualized value added of negative 0.2 per cent.” Compound that 0.2 per cent annual shortfall over 19 years, and it adds up to more than $70-billion in forgone income, on assets that now total $714-billion. [0]
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-cppib-pensio...
That is how Norway did it
Like, well done. Impressive financial planning at that scale
This is not a wealth fund at all. This is a debt fund. It doesnt even try to hide the debt that's drowning the federal government.
We are borrowing money to play the stock market.
I guess it benefits my kids though
Both aim to take today's windfall and spend it on something other than hookers and blow.
Norway still does have some totally unjustifiable passion projects, like the coastal highway it's building, but it's doing this from general funds to keep the wealth fund separately managed as a giant pile of investment money that just happens to belong to an investor called 'Norway', while in Saudi Arabia it is an instrument of policy.
Now it's not the Federal government and taxpayers propping up the oil industry by buying yet another oil pipeline, but rather a "sovereign wealth fund" (funded by Canadian taxpayers).
To me it sounds less like a "sovereign wealth fund" and more like a domestic infrastructure bank wrapped in populist messaging. I expect plenty of boomers to invest to "stick it to Trump", elbows up!
If Canada ran resources like Norway does, it would have an enormous "excess profit". Norway's royalty rates and "profits" are dramatically higher than Canada where decades of American psyops fooled a bunch of very foolish people that the primary purpose of Canada is to ensure maximum profits for US orgs.
But really, international economics is just mostly made up, and if enough people go along with it then it's as real as real can be.
What is not made up is that if you need to import things from other countries, then you need to export things from your country in proportional value, or else the country as a whole loses purchasing power (i.e. gets poorer). In this case, if Canada is increasing its money supply, then the purchasing power of the currency will go down unless it correspondingly increases demand for its currency (usually by increased demand for its goods and services, including land or businesses in Canada).
So the US is the world's poorest nation, by far, right? Country has a two trillion dollar+ deficit, a one trillion dollar trade deficit, absolutely no end in sight of spiralling to bankruptcy (it's only getting worse), and lets the money printer go brrrr.
Most of international economics are made up, and often are nonsensical. There is no master book of records that dictates cause and effect (there simply isn't, so at best we get "but if you do this...that maybe will happen...or maybe it won't", but mostly it's people looking around and trying to figure out what other people will go along with.
Considering the USD still has decent purchasing power, no? The demand for US goods and services relative to other nations' might have dropped from its peak, but still considerably higher than other nations.
>There is no master book of records that dictates cause and effect
There is for simple stuff, like supply and demand. There is no way of getting around that executing a successful peaceful trade requires both parties to have something that the other wants.
On a nation state level, debt denominated in a nation's currency is more like a claim on the future productivity of a nation (since any nation can always print money or edit a digital database to satisfy its debts).
When you buy a US Treasury, you are betting that at some point in the future, the US is going to be be selling things worth having. You are not worried that your loan to the US will default, because it is trivial for the US government to repay you in USD. Your risk is that when it gets paid back, what will you be able to buy with it?
You understand I was applying your logic, right? The US has the worst trade deficit on the planet, by a long shot. It buys far, far more than it sells. Its primary role on the planet is money printer.
>When you buy a US Treasury, you are betting that at some point in the future, the US is going to be be selling things worth having.
Again, this almost sounds sophomoric. When you buy US treasuries, you are betting that the US will still be printing money when it matures, or when you unload it earlier. It is not based on sound rational logic -- if so the country with the $40 trillion dollar debt and $2 trillion dollar deficit with the massive trade deficit -- would be already bankrupt.
I feel like I'm arguing with someone who is arguing rational economics when someone points out how farcical a stock like TSLA is. All of the hot air in the world doesn't change the fact that it relies upon a shared delusion, and everyone is playing a bit of a game of chicken.
I am not sure what logic you are referring to. My first reply was to point out that no matter what economics are "made up", when push comes to shove, there has to be delivery of real goods and services for the charade to continue. "Enough" people won't go along with someone that doesn't result in them getting what they want, and no one wants a currency if they don't think it will get them what they want.
My second post is responding to the claim that America is the poorest country, to which it obviously isn't, since it can still buy almost whatever it wants.
Regardless of the technical details, someone who can buy something is richer than someone who cannot buy something. Maybe that is due to a shared delusion, and maybe everyone is playing a bit of chicken. Obviously, that will only be revealed in the future, but in general, that's what all sovereign nations' debt is, a "delusion" (or assumption) that the fruit of the nation's productivity will be worth having in the future.
Historically, this just ends up with Toronto and Montreal (and to a more limited extent, Vancouver) treating the rest of the country as a resource colony. The pretense that consent of the governed is equally geographically distributed is, naturally, very useful to you.
If you do that again, as you did in the '60s, Canada will only be Toronto and Montreal.
So, where most Canadians live?
The market economy is brilliant.