Canadian citizenship - now cheaper than ever!

"We want Chinese investors in Canada and the door is open," ImpMin Chris Alexander told the South China Morning Post back in March. "We are making these changes for them."

CBC :
"The Canadian government will give permanent residency to approximately 50 millionaire immigrant investors and their families per year under a pilot program set to begin in the new year.

Under the Immigrant Investor Venture Capital pilot program announced Tuesday, each investor will be required to make a non-guaranteed investment of $2 million over 15 years and have a net worth of $10 million."

By comparison, New Zealand requires a C$9.15 million investment over three years while in October the Australian government raised the price of admission to $15 million for a 12 month track to permanent residency.

Under the previous cash for citizenship scheme dating back to Mulroney in 1986, wealthy immigrants with a minimum net worth of C$1.6-million only had to loan the government $800,000 interest-free for five years but the loan was guaranteed and returned to them at the end of five years.
It was intended to encourage wealthy foreigners to set up businesses in Canada but according to the South China Morning Post earlier this year, the majority were wealthy mainland Chinese who never did move to Canada and only 16 per cent of them wound up operating businesses in Canada. 

SCMP, Feb 4 2014 :

A South China Morning Post investigation into Canada's immigration programme for millionaire investors has revealed the extraordinary extent to which it has become devoted to a single outcome: Helping rich mainland Chinese settle in Vancouver.

Since 2007, 80.8 per cent of Chinese applicants to the scheme have sought to live in British Columbia ... about six times the combined annual applications from all nationalities to the investor migrant programmes run by the US, Britain and Australia.

And it was a bust to boot . As Pete McMartin wrote in the Vancouver Sun in Feb :

"The investor class immigrants have been laughing all the way to the bank. According to the feds’ own research, over a 20-year period an investor class immigrant will pay $200,000 less in taxes than a skilled worker immigrant and $100,000 less in taxes than a live-in nanny. The immigrant billionaire living on the west side pays less in Canadian taxes than his immigrant babysitter."

Right. So back to the new rules. Having determined what we are, as the old joke goes, we are now just haggling over the price.

MinImp Chris Alexander gave a decent Q&A interview to the South China Morning Post on the new rules back in March. Excerpted  : 

Alexander : “In return for permanent residence, in return for the opportunity to do business with status from Canada, we’re taking your money for a good long time to help create jobs, growth, opportunity in Canada and for global businesses, we hope, through venture capital-focused that will be managed in Canada, and privately managed, not managed by the government. ... And believe me, there are Hong Kong and Chinese students, entrepreneurs, investors who are part of those small ecosystems driving this forward."

Will there be regional options for the scheme?

Alexander : "No, these will be pooled funds initially, so they’re going to have to be managed by professional private-sector investment managers in financial centres where those people exist. And that is quite a few Canadian cities now. We’ll have a competition to select who the managers will be, but I don’t think we’ll be directing the investment beyond that." 

"We are pursuing a strong partnership with Hong Kong and with mainland China in all fields. Our economic relationship is already approaching CA$75 billion million.  We want, as of January 1 2015, to process economic immigrants in six months."

Earlier this month, the Harper government quietly signed a customs-sharing agreement with China without announcing it to the public.

China Daily, yesterday, via the WSJ :

"Canada and China have agreed to a set of measures to support the increased use of the renminbi in trade, commerce and investment.
A reciprocal currency swap will allow a maximum amount of 200 billion yuan ($32.3 billion) and C$30 billion($26 billion).
Domenico Lombardi, an expert on the global economy from Canada's think tank Centre for International Governance Innovation, recently said, "We should prepare to see the renminbi be much more widely used, to become an international currency".

Edit : Updated figures for Australia, and typos
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Goldman Sachs to plot sale of Ontario public assets

Ish Theilheimer at Straight Goods wonders why there has been no public outcry about McGuinty's decision to hire Goldman Sachs to come up with a privatization blueprint for 49% of Hydro One, Ontario Power Generation, the Ontario Lottery and Gaming Corporation, and the Liquor Control Board of Ontario.

The LCBO, OLG, Hydro One and OPG provide more than $10 million a day, totalling $4.1 billion in profit last year to fund social services for Ontario - making Bay Street's usual privatization argument pretty weak here - but, um, Goldman Sachs?

Ish : "In the USA, for instance, the company has supervised highway privatization deals in which it acted as a financial advisor to the state at the same time as it invested in companies vying for the highways."

In Goldman Sachs : The Great American Bubble Machine, Matt Taibbi describes the corp as

"a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money..."

"the heads of the Canadian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman ..."

Following its part in managing the recent financial collapse of Greece, the Vampire Squid is being investigated for fraud by the US Securities and Exchange Commission for misleading its own clients and encouraging them to invest in a product that was destined to fail.

Canada doesn't have a national securities regulator. In announcing plans to put one in place on May 3rd, Fin Min Jim Flaherty said that Canada is not directly probing Goldman Sachs because any probe of Goldman would fall under provincial jurisdiction.

Oh, go, McGuinty!

Fun facts : Vampire Squid corporate tax rate in 2008? One percent.
Fin. Times : "Goldman Sachs Group Inc and 22 European banks were the major beneficiaries of US$93-billion in payments from AIG -- more than half of the U.S. taxpayer money spent to rescue the massive insurer."
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The miracle of Goldman Sachs

The G&M notes the "miraculous recovery" of Goldman Sachs, "expected to report Tuesday that it made a profit of more than $2-billion US in the March to June period – possibly its best quarter in two years."

It's a freakin' miracle alright - just like the miracle of the cups and ball trick.

Or, as Matt Taibbi writes in Goldman Sachs : The Great American Bubble Machine, helpfully posted up at Statism Watch , it's like "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money... If America is circling the drain, Goldman Sachs has found a way to be that drain."

Matt Taibbi does the trick with the transparent cups :

The formula is relatively simple: Goldman positions itself in the middle of a speculative bubble, selling investments they know are crap. Then they hoover up vast sums from the middle and lower floors of society with the aid of a crippled and corrupt state that allows it to rewrite the rules in exchange for the relative pennies the bank throws at political patronage. Finally, when it all goes bust, leaving millions of ordinary citizens broke and starving, they begin the entire process over again, riding in to rescue us all by lending us back our own money at interest.

And why should you care? Well "the heads of the Canadian national banks are Goldman alums, as is the head of the World Bank, the head of the New York Stock Exchange, the last two heads of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York - which, incidentally, is now in charge of overseeing Goldman ..."

Penn and Teller, well, Penn, explains that one of the secrets of magic is to never repeat a trick for the same audience, but Taibbi tells us "Goldman Sachs has engineered every major market manipulation since the Great Depression - and they’re about to do it again." Good article.

Fun fact : Goldman Sachs' corporate tax rate in 2008 : 1%
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United Future World Currency

Well here it is - the proposed "united future world currency" unveiled by Russian President Medvedev today and handed out to the other G-8 leaders.

The test coin "means they’re getting ready," Medvedev said. "I think it’s a good sign that we understand how interdependent we are."

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China and Russia have been calling for a supranational currency, a mix of regional reserve currencies controlled by the IMF and delinked from sovereign nations, as part of the drive to address the global financial crisis and replace the dollar as the world's reserve currency.

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When asked about it in March, US Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner told the Council on Foreign Relations : "We are quite open to that" - causing a drop in the dollar requiring him to follow up with : "I think the dollar remains the world’s dominant reserve currency" - after which "the dollar subsequently recovered much of its losses".

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I guess my dream of a global currency based on reducing carbon emissions didn't make the cut again this year. On the upside, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck should be going apeshit tomorrow.

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Danger! Bankers at work!

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h/t Brasscheck TV

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Matt Taibbi : The Big Takeover

How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution

"It's over — we're officially, royally fucked.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses)."

continued ...

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The free market : it isn't free and it isn't a market

"The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the US Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year. The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives.

A.I.G.’s main business is insurance, but the financial products unit sold hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of derivatives, the notorious credit-default swaps that nearly toppled the entire company last fall.
A.I.G. had set up a special bonus pool for the financial products unit early in 2008, before the company’s near collapse, when problems stemming from the mortgage crisis were becoming clear and there were concerns that some of the best-informed derivatives specialists might leave.
Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., argued that some bonuses were needed to keep the most skilled executives."

AIG loss in 2008 was $99.3 billion.

Fin. Times : "Goldman Sachs Group Inc and 22 European banks were the major beneficiaries of US$93-billion in payments from AIG -- more than half of the U.S. taxpayer money spent to rescue the massive insurer."

Goldman Sachs was formerly led by Henry Paulson who was treasury secretary at the time of the original AIG bailout.

Michael Parenti : "They don't mind recessions. Recessions are fine. It allows them to buy up smaller companies at bargain prices. It disciplines labor. It humiliates and beats back people. And this, I think, is what we're facing.
And it's not merely because of a number of wicked personalities, because these personalities are brought to the fore. Those are the people who get the rewards.
The free market does not work. It's not free. It's not really a market; it's a plunder. And it has to be done away with."
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Cramer vs Stewart

Once again Jon Stewart, the supposedly fake news anchor - "Hey, I come on at night after Puppets Who Kill!" - exposes the real fake : a supposedly real financial NBC journalist.

Puppets who kill, indeed.

Update : Drat! Foiled by Viacom!

Well, you can still catch it at Mike Watkin's in four parts.

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The Amway, Blackwater, Focus on the Family Tree

Bill Berkowitz reports that Amway is getting ready to make a comeback.
What superb timing.
Just as we are getting used to the idea that much of the financial markets is one giant ponzi scheme, a company roughly based on the pyramid chain letter is set to rebuild its brand : a multi-level marketing scheme based on selling cleaning products to yourself while buying motivational tapes from the person up the chain who talked you into it.

Don't sneer. Amway made over $7-billion in 2007, having exported 80% of its business abroad to China, India, and Russia - where presumably a whole new batch of "distributors" is out looking around for people willing to buy their motivational tapes.
It's all about the networking.
Berkowitz reminds us of Amway's own networks and Muckety provides a nice interactive family tree with many more links than I've pillaged here :

• Amway co-founder Richard DeVos was chair of the Republican National Committee and former chair of the Council for National Policy.
• His son Dick DeVos, billionaire former president of Amway, is married to Betsy DeVos, former chair of the Michigan Republican Party and founder of the National Right To Life Committee.
• Betsy is the older sister of Erik Prince, founder of Blackwater USA.
• Betsy and Erik's mom, Elsa Prince Broekhuizen, is a director of the Council for National Policy along with Grover Norquist and Paul Weyrich and FotF's James Dobson, and a board member of Focus on the Family herself.

As Amway co-CEO Doug DeVos put it : "We thought, well, if we’re going to build a brand, build the brand that everybody knows already."

Fun fact : While the Mormons took the brunt of the coverage for their anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 campaign in California, the Colorado Independent reports that our Focus on the Family tree pumped more than six times as much as the Mormon church did into the Protect Marriage campaign - $1.25 million .

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Chomsky : Understanding the Crisis

A fascinating interview with Noam Chomsky at Foreign Policy in Focus.

On the people who are now designing Obama's economic policies :

"Dean Baker, one of the few economists who saw what was coming all along, pointed out that it's almost like appointing Osama bin Laden to run the so-called war on terror.
Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers, Clinton's treasury secretaries, are among the main architects of the crisis. Summers intervened strongly to prevent any regulation of derivatives and other exotic instruments. Rubin, who preceded him, was right in the lead of undermining the Glass-Steagall act, all of which is pretty ironic. The Glass-Steagall Act protected commercial banks from risky investment firms, insurance firms, and so on, which kind of protected the core of the economy. That was broken up in 1999 largely under Rubin's influence. He immediately left the treasury department and became a director of Citigroup, which benefited from the breakdown of Glass-Steagall by expanding and becoming a "financial supermarket" as they called it. Just to increase the irony (or the tragedy if you like) Citigroup is now getting huge taxpayer subsidies to try to keep it together and just in the last few weeks announced that it's breaking up. It's going back to trying to protect its commercial banking from risky side investments. Rubin resigned in disgrace — he's largely responsible for this. But he's one of Obama's major economic advisors, Summers is another one; Summer's protégé Tim Geithner is the Treasury Secretary."

Privatizing Hydro-Québec

Hydro-Québec is a crown corporation and the largest producer of hydro-electric power in the world. Worth $130B, its revenue in 2007 was over $12B, of which $2B went as a dividend to Quebec City. It provides Québec with the world's cheapest hydro rates.

The Montreal Economic Institute is a neoliberal think tank devoted to disbanding the wheat board and privatizing water, healthcare, and now apparently Hydro-Québec.


Yesterday the MEI released its report plumping for the privatization of Hydro-Québec.
Author Claude Garcia explained that while privatization would mean higher rates for Quebec consumers, they would gain the advantage of choosing their service provider and could be given shares in the new company. And why not sell power at 9.6 cents per kilowatt-hour to energy-thirsty consumers in Boston or New York, rather than at the current rate of 3 cents charged to Quebec's aluminum smelters?

Here's how that report was dutifully replayed in the media yesterday :

G&M : Report calls for sale of Hydro- Québec
"Hydro-Québec is racked by wretched inefficiency and would be better off to Quebec being privatized according to a new study commissioned by the Montreal Economic Institute."

CTV : Hydro-Quebec would be more effective if privatized, study finds
"A new study suggests Hydro-Quebec is racked by inefficiency and would be more valuable to the province if it were privatized."

CJAD : Sell off Hydro-Quebec, make an extra 10 billion a year. .
Bloomberg : Quebec Should Sell Hydro-Quebec, Globe Says, Citing Study .
Trading Markets : Privatizing Hydro-Québec would give $10 billion more a year to Quebecers .
Montreal Gazette : Our cheap power comes at a price .

OK, help me out here. If selling excess energy to the US is the goal, why not do it while retaining Hydro-Québec as a crown corporation for the longterm benefit of Quebec?
Could someone please explain that to me?
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Steve and Kory ready their shovels

Yes that is the original meaning of CBC's new favourite phrase.

h/t The Phrase Freak

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Flaperty's little fixer-upper

Thus far the only party that hasn't made up its mind about Steve's budget is the Libs - all the others hate it.
Will Iggy pass it to avoid an election? No one wants an election - the Libs are too broke and the Harpercon base are too furious with him for his "liberal" budget to show up.

So what's your vote worth to Steve?
They propose to add a $6 billion stimulus package to the $13 billion deficit they had already racked up so far and which they presumably wished to hide within this economic crisis package. We will all get $199 to $599 each, unless you're really poor in which case you'll only get $33. If you're on a fixed low income, you get nothing.

Six out of 10 Canadians pay into EI but still won't be eligible to receive it - no change there.

If you can afford to spend up to $10,000 on a home reno, you'll get a 15% tax credit on it next year if you get it done by Feb 2010. Renters - bupkiss.

Personal income tax exemption will go up from the $10,100 already scheduled for 2009 to $10,320. That's 2.2%.

Every dollar the feds put into infrastructure will be contingent on the provinces and municipalities ponying up 73 cents to match it - although Flaperty says they'll be able to get around this and Iggy is going to challenge it.

Did I mention banks will get at least $200 billion with no upper dollar limit? Plus that $4.4 billion in cuts to business taxes?

Here's the real story.
The whole purpose of tax cuts is to reduce the size and role of government in the long term. Less childcare, education, health and social security; more P3s and deregulation.
So for all the flap about the Cons throwing money around, this is still ultimately a neocon ReformaTory budget.
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Man of Steel vs. the Incredible Shrinking Mandate

One of the crowning glories of Steve's Five Priorities Four Pillars Three Little Pigs Accountability Act was his paean to Canada's Gnu Government transparency - the creation of the Parliamentary Budget Office to provide independent analysis of the national economy and the government's fiscal position.

First budget officer Kevin Page, or "Man of Steel" as Jennifer calls him, has produced two reports since March, both critical of the government.
The first, released during the election, calculated that the cost of the Afghanistan mission not including military equipment will be about $18.1 billion by 2011.
The second, published shortly before Diamond Jim Flaherty vowed there would absolutely be no chance of a deficit next year, projected a deficit for next year.

"In his economic statement, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty projected a budget surplus of $100 million for 2009-10 based on the sale of about $2 billion in assets that he didn't identify."

Mr. Flatulence has since reluctantly come around to Kevin Page's assessment, predicting a $15-billion deficit, only to be contradicted himself by Steve who is now calling for a $20 to $30-billion deficit.

So it won't come as much of a surprise to hear that in the matter of the Department of Finance vs the Parliamentary Budget Office, old Kev has had his budget frozen -( h/t Steve ) - presumably because accurate financial forecasts are a dime a dozen lately in Steve's Fiscal Funhouse.

Actually it's a testament to Mr. Page's perseverence that he has got this far. Both Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella and House Speaker Peter Milliken want him reined in, arguing that the "budget office is simply an extension of the services the Library [of Parliament] already offers."

"The parliamentary library operates on a solicitor-client basis. This means any research the library collects for MPs and senators is "privileged" and can be withheld at their request. As an adjunct of the library, Mr. Page's reports would be done for MPs and committees who then can could use the information as they want."

Privileged. Witheld at their request. As they want.

In 2006 a document at the Library of Parliament outlined the various forms the Parliamentary Budget Office could take and decided it should not be granted the same independence enjoyed by the Auditor General. Evidently no one informed the Man of Steel.

Budget 2009 : Open door policy!

Via Maxwell's House, we learn that Jim Flaherty, Minister of Finangling, has thrown open the doors to all Canadians to contribute to Budget 2009 at the ministry website! Really. What's your pleasure?
Sure there's a handy list of suggestions but also a page to write in your own.

Sven at Fish Eggs has an idea :

"Every Canadian Citizen, will, for the next twelve months, receive a $2000 monthly payment. If you make more than $35,000 per year, it will be progressively taxed to ensure it gets to those whom need it the most. Simple.

This programme will run for one year only. Short.

As the lower income earners all know, this money would enter the economy almost completely, as there is little or no room for most to squirrel away their money. People could spend this money to buy a car, thus bailing out the auto industry. Or they could choose to spend it on housing, thus bailing out the housing industry. Or they may decide to invest in more education and go back to school, thus bailing out the education sector. What matters here is that the PEOPLE would decide where to put OUR hard earned tax dollars. The politicians would then be able to see where we chose to put our money and they could then craft legislation to reflect these investment choices made by Canadians. Effective."

Go for it, Sven.

$7,700,000,000,000? Holy crap!

Earlier today I saw this handy click-to-enlarge pie chart at Boing Boing from Voltage Blog

The pie on the right includes the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the moonshot, the S&L crisis, the New deal, NASA, and the Korean, Vietnam, and Iraq wars, for a total of $4.6 trillion.

On the left we have the slightly larger 2008 bailout pie.

But then tonight I read at Bloomberg : Nope, it's not $4.6 trillion, it's $7,700,000,000,000.

At $24,000 for every man, woman and child in the US, it could pay off more than half their mortgages.

Bob Eisenbeis, economist for the Atlanta Fed for 10 years, on the lack of government oversight : "They got snookered."

But these are just loans, right? The companies will pay the taxpayers back when ... when ....

Holy crap! Isn't this the part in the movie where the seasoned old cop/FBI/CIA guy tells the anxious victim not to submit to blackmail/ransom/terrorist's demands because they will never stop their demands no matter how much you pay them and besides if you give in they're just gonna kill you/your wife/your country afterwards anyway?

Commenter Frank W at Boing Boing : "Money is a meme. It consists of the belief in it. That does not mean it does not exist, just that it consists of the belief in it. So, here's a pretty picture of a unicorn."

The state of corporate welfare

From Canada's first independent parliamentary budget officer :

"Though Canada's disappearing surplus is partially the result of a global financial crisis, the report says the minority Conservative government shoulders some of the responsibility because of policy decisions during Prime Minister Stephen Harper's first term in office.
"The weak fiscal performance to date is largely attributable to previous policy decisions as opposed to weakened economic conditions," the report says.
It pinpoints the government's second one-percentage-point reduction in the goods and services tax and reductions in corporate income taxes for causing the lowest budget balance in the first five months of the fiscal year in recent times.
In August, the year-to-date budget surplus stood at $1.2 billion, down from $6.6 billion the year before."

Thank you, Mr. Kevin Page.

Meanwhile Chrysler Canada has asked Ottawa and Ontario for $1-billion in aid, after the "big three" in the US hit up their taxpayers for $25-billion.

On the US side, Ford CEO Alan Mulally took home $28 million in pay in 2007 while GM's Rick Wagoner struggled by on $15.7 million.

As a private company, Chrysler is not required to disclose the salary paid to its execs and CEO Robert Nardelli has offered to reduce his salary to $1 till business picks up, but don't feel too bad for him - Home Depot paid him $210 million to piss off last year.

About now one usually hears the free market argument that CEO's must be "adequately reimbursed" in order to remain competitive.

All three U.S. auto industry leaders flew to the Washington bailout hearings to ask for money in separate luxury jets. Each flight was estimated to cost $20,000 (U.S.)

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One final note. While knocking around google, trying to find out how much the Canadian Chrysler CEO makes, I ran into this at The Truth About Cars :

Chinese May Buy GM and Chrysler from The Middle Kingdom Herald.

An editorial at TTAC notes : "As of September, the U.S. Treasury owes China $585b. With GM’s market cap now standing at a pocket change rate of $1.35b, and getting cheaper by the minute, China could buy 433 General Motors with their T bills alone."

On Oct 7, Harper told Peter Mansbridge that there's probably "some great buying opportunities out there ... I think there are probably some gains to be made in the stock market. That's my own view."

Corporate welfare fraud

Naomi Klein :

"Washington's handling of the bailout is not merely incompetent. It may well be illegal.

According to Congressman Barney Frank, one of the architects of the legislation that enables the deals, "Any use of these funds for any purpose other than lending -- for bonuses, for severance pay, for dividends, for acquisitions of other institutions, etc. -- is a violation of the act." Yet this is exactly how the funds are being used."

American International Group Inc. got an expanded $150 billion government bailout this week, and is setting aside $503 million in compensation for executives.

Bloomberg : "The Treasury has committed $290 billion of the $350 billion already allocated through capital injections to banks and AIG. The four attending members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee's subcommittee on domestic policy accused Treasury of picking "winners and losers'' by giving loans to healthy banks to use in buying smaller ones."

"This administration wants to privatize Wall Street’s gains and socialize Wall Street’s losses," said Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md.

"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around [the banks] will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs. ~ Thomas Jefferson, 1802

Lo and behold: the $100M Olympic Village bail-out

In a secret meeting on October 14, Vancouver council voted unanimously to lend $100-million to Millennium Development, the private corporation building the $1.1-billion 2010 Olympic Village, for cost over-runs.

Vancouver's Director of Finance, Estelle Lo, who reportedly had concerns about the city's involvement in the Olympic athletes' village and who was stripped of her control over financing decisions related to the athletes' village in April, was not at the meeting.

Ms Lo reportedly resigned on Oct 29.

That's quite a lot of "reportedly"s and no word from the city.

Millenium is also leaking a $65-million cost overrun on its 176 unit Evelyn Drive project above Park Royal in West Van and in danger of default on a 170 room hotel contract in Nanaimo. h/t Bill Tieleman

One of Millenium's backers is private-equity and hedge-fund manager Fortress Investment Group.

G&M :

"Donald Trump is tied up in a legal fight over a Chicago skyscraper that is now worth less at completion than the total value of the loans it took to build it.
The shortfall is about $100-million. Interestingly, one of the lenders in this case is Fortress Investment Group, the primary lender in the athletes' village project."

Ross is on the details of this with a half a dozen posts.

Meanwhile, over in the UK :

"Government ministers have delayed a taxpayer bail-out for the £1bn athletes' village at the London 2012 Olympics until the beginning of next year at the earliest.
The scheme hit trouble when the developer Lend Lease could not raise finance and the possible resale value of the flats slumped. Also at the meeting was John Armitt, the Olympic Delivery Authority chairman, who has said taxpayers might have to bail out the entire £1bn cost."

So. Could it happen here?

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Wednesday night update : G&M :

"Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan asked the police Wednesday to investigate the "theft" of documents from city hall that revealed that city council had authorized a loan of up to $100-million to the financially strapped developer of the 2010 Olympics athletes village."

Yeah, Sammy, coz that's the really important issue here.

And now for something completely predictable...

Recent testimony from economist Alan Greenspan, 19 years at the helm of the Fed, can only really be appreciated if you imagine that it is part of a previously undiscovered Monty Python skit :

"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such as that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Mr. Greenspan said.

Referring to his free-market ideology, Mr. Greenspan added: "I have found a flaw. I don’t know how significant or permanent it is. But I have been very distressed by that fact."

Rep. Henry Waxman pressed the former Fed chair to clarify his words.

"In other words, you found that your view of the world, your ideology, was not right, it was not working," Mr. Waxman said.

"Absolutely, precisely," Mr. Greenspan replied. "You know, that’s precisely the reason I was shocked, because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."

h/t Relentlessly : "Alan Greenspan testified today before the house that myopic self interest would not lead to the creation of the New Jerusalem here on earth."