The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP #153 - BITCOIN ALL TIME HIGH LOOMS (Other Notable Stories)

Episode Date: March 6, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES Join us for some QUALITY Bitcoin and economics talk, with a Canadian focus, every Monday at 7 PM EST. This week: -Wendy’s pricing strategy-Banking is fine-CPPIB selling assets-First-Time Home Buyer Incentive is done and so much more From a couple of Canucks who like to talk about how Bitcoin will impact Canada. As always, none of the info is financial advice. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠Discord: ⁠https://discord.gg/ESRCZWpb A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. With their new kyc-free options, there's never been a quicker, simpler, more private and (most importantly) cheaper way to acquire private Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones, and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer.

The Canadian Bitcoiners podcast is just two guys and maybe a guest or two discussing Bitcoin, Bitcoin equities, and the related macroeconomic space. It's not meant to be financial advice, so please, if you're doing any investing, after listening to our program, do your own research, do your own due diligence, and understand that any money you invest can be lost the show is meant for entertainment purposes only and we hope you enjoy the program let's do it so yeah wendy's joey wendy's they want to go where no fast food company has ever gone before i gotta i love this this is a great idea it's not a great idea well it's capitalism right they could do what they want and people could vote with their wallets. And for people who are unaware of what the heck I'm talking about,

they have plans to go ahead with something where people are describing as surge pricing, and they're going to be going ahead with this in 2025. But Wendy's is not calling it surge pricing, and they're calling it dynamic pricing. So it's just cinematics anyways they say they're going to take advantage of their digital menus that they have and they're going to be adjusting their prices based on the demand and this is similar to how other companies like uber or lyft do things where you know in times when things are very very in huge demand uber and lyft cost way way more than other times of the day oh

yeah and if this works for wendy's you got to think about this because they're trailblazing here if it works for them and they can somehow increase their profitability it's just a matter of time before somebody else follows suit right if somebody if somebody is proving that it works and you can make more money doing it why wouldn't another company do the same thing yeah and now remember the cpi i'm going to go into the weeds here remember the cpi we always question the validity of it how truthful it is but how put it and even even if you're you know you're trying your level best to figure out the price increases from month to month year to year it's fucking challenging to figure that out to put in the basket of goods all this shit now you got to throw in dynamic

pricing from fucking wendy's into this it's going to make calculating the cpi even more challenging moving forward but all this goes to show you is that the fast food industry industry it's going to go through a lot of modernization moving forward because next up we, there's going to be workers replace replacing, sorry, robots replacing workers. Yeah. And it's already happening on a small scale,

but on a larger scale, this could easily happen. And while there could be some wholesale changes taking place in this industry, what's the end result here is you're going to have a heck of a lot of people probably that are going to be out of work. And while Wendy's is probably going to have a heck of a lot of people probably that are going to be out of work. And Wendy's is probably going to make a heck of a lot more money due to this dynamic slash surge pricing. If you don't like it, you could vote with your pocketbook.

Don't go there. Go somewhere else at the time that they drive up the prices. But I'm curious to see how this plays out because if it does well, like I said, it's going to be copied over and over again by every fast food company out there. So they walked it back, right? So they're not going to go through with it, at least for now under this, whatever, you know, naming this and this nomenclature is not going to be what they use.

You're right. They're already calling it dynamic pricing when really it's surge pricing. The thing that makes Uber surge pricing unique and in my opinion, valid as a strategy is that when more and more people are asking for rides and there's no drivers out there you have to raise the cost to the user to both discourage riders which you're not going to do but encourage off the app drivers to get on the app

and start picking people up this is the supply and demand okay i get this i understand this everyone's seen the uh you know the uh equilibrium curves. Everyone's taking a base level economics course has seen that. That's what this is. For Wendy's, I'm unclear on why they would need surge pricing. Just because they are selling too many hamburgers that day and they maybe think they can get a bit more money for the hamburger and they decide to add a couple of cents to the price of the hamburger. I'm not sure. It's an interesting idea at a Wendy's of course, because everyone is driven by profits and they want to make as much money as possible. I get that. It's fine. No big deal. But I don't think you need it. And I think the customer base would be pretty upset

about that. At least I would think that if the customer base had two brain cells to rub together, because I cannot imagine that anyone who goes to a wendy's and sees the price of a you know double dave burger or whatever they're selling over there what do they call them over there a quarter pounder half pounder is that wendy's i think it is right quarter pounders is mcdonald's so what does wendy's call their burgers don't they have like the dave burger or something or is that old i don't know let's check it out we got to find out what they're called wendy's burger squares yeah right menu items at wendy's okay let's see what's the normal i'm gonna i'm gonna realize right away that we should have known this and we didn't here we go this is good business on air here and looking at the wendy's menu

stay hungry my friends hamburgers wow they got a lot of stuff here croissants oh my god oh this is the baconator the d's single, Dave's double, Dave's triple. Okay. Single, double, triple is what they call it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like if you decide that too many people are buying the Dave's triple and you raise the price 20 or 30 cents, I don't think a lot of people who are in line at Wendy's are going to leave the store over 30 cents. You know what I mean? I'm pretty sure they're not. They might do buy now pay later instead to keep the good times rolling maybe or something, but I don't think they're going to leave the store. And so I do expect them to do this at some point because people who go to fast food

restaurants, generally speaking, are not going there to save money. They're going there to satisfy a salt sugar craving cycle that's going to drive them into type two diabetes in an early grave uh on their way to uh you know on their way to a you know difficult uh decade with uh he's like salt and sugar problems so the couple of kids are out of shape i don't know the buy now pay later option i think it's brilliant they're not gonna do no as a consumer it makes total sense how could they repossess after you eat it? At that point, bankruptcy, you're laughing. Right? Just take advantage while you can. Don't allow them on that loan for the hamburger.

I don't know why you would do this. Yeah, well, why would you not do this, right? And you know what else, Len? Years ago on this show, I think we probably talked about it, but I can't remember if it was 2020 or 2021 the first time I saw this. You know, grocery stores have had these digital tags for a long time already. I'm sure you, listener, viewer in your hometown, if you're in a semi-major Canadian metro and you have a store like Metro or Fortino's or any of the Loblaws chains, they have digital tags now on the items in the store on the shelves. I think that there's something to

that. And I think that food producers know intrinsically where things are going in a way that maybe retail consumers don't, and maybe also governments don't or pretend not to. And so they use those tags as a way to be able to update prices quickly. Think about how many times they would have had to change the tags in every single 14-0s for the price of eggs or milk, right? If it's a digital one, they could just easily do it. They do it on a dime. Exactly, right? They do it every day if they want. And soon, I think there's potential that will happen because as we just talked about earlier in the show, the cost of your lettuce is going to go up when the price of oil goes from 72 to 82,

and then it's going to go up again from 82 to 85, and up again from 85 to 90, and 90 to 95, and so on, and so on, and so on. They need those tools in place to be able to do that. Now, politicians, I think at that point will say, hey, look, this is surge pricing. It's unfair. But I would say that it's anything but. I would say that they were prepared for a scenario that I think a lot of people saw coming, including people who listen to and watch this show and you and I. And they ignored it for the most part, the people who should have been taking care of it. And now you're kind of seeing the consequences. I don't think that Wendy's is going to be alone in this. I think you're right.

And I think that you're going to see more and more of this because it's sort of what the culture, the economic culture at the moment demands, right? You have to be agile in your pricing. And you see this anyways, by the way, in a lot of higher end restaurants. If you go to a high end restaurant and order fish, what do you usually see as the price? It's going to be very, very expensive. No, no. What do you see? There's no price. It says market. It says market or price. Yeah. But so you pay, you pay based on what the costs to bring that fish in or what the fish is.

You're going to see this more and more. This is not new. It's just that now everyone is subjected to it for everything because of the backdrop. That's, that's not going to change. It's not back. This is just advancing like the way things are done. It's just going to change. It's not back. This is just advancing the way things are done.

It's just the next level. It gives them the opportunity to adjust prices based on demand. Yeah. And they can maximize it. Let them. Let them. Yeah. And you know what?

Capitalism hopefully will solve everything. It's better for me because I don't think a lot of people are buying nothing but ground beef and eggs. So hopefully I can get a decent deal on ground beef and eggs. I don't know i'm hoping capitalism will sort it out because there'll be competition and people will like i say vote with their pocketbooks and the ones that provide the best value is going to get the most money and they'll get rewarded and others should copy suit and that's just the way things go like that's just an open market yeah good something that's not watching this price so closely 68 560 okay do the next story i'm gonna unplug and plug my block hawk back in you

can watch me trouble see i chirped him enough to finally get this i just unplug it and plug it back in it should work at the next cycle anyways banks are safe people remember i'm telling you this banks are safe actually probably it's not the case because a federal reserve policy warns on the possible financial sector risks with respect to banks no fucking shit if you look at companies like new york community bank corp for instance and you know if you look at them you can confirm that they're at least cracks within the financial system. And for those unaware, shares of this regional bank took another 20% shit just this past week when it was reported due to that they had bad quarterly earnings report. People didn't like that, of course.

And a lot of this is being attributed to exposure to the commercial real estate market in the state of new york which has been a losing ticket as of late and but back to the fed report and remember the btfp program well that is ending right that's coming to an end and that was put in place to shore up the banking sector after several collapses last year with this program ending the banks are now back in the spotlight as their safety net has been removed so big companies if you look at like the jp morgans the bank of america bank of america's they're all doing well when you look at their stock price if you take a look at their stock price it seems that everything's going okay but look at the regional banks there are a lot of them that are taking a kick to the nuts.

Their stock price has tanked significantly over the past year, sometimes in the past week, as I was mentioning for the New York Community Bancorp. So these regional banks, we talk about it enough. This is the canary in a coal mine. These are the ones that are going to go tits up first. They have the least amount of capital that they could they could deal with any problem at times so they're going to have to get either bought up or the fed comes in and builds them out or some combination of the two but look out because there's going to be some major fucking bank

failures this year btfp coming to an end they have nothing left the exposure is fucking real they have some financial risks and even the federal reserve this policy report fucking underlines that there's some problems here this is gonna be a fun year to watch what happens okay so zero hedge uh wrote a story or put a story out on the same topic that we covered two weeks before then, when we talked about the difference in credit, sort of credit, what was the name of this program or this figure? It was like the distressed credit, basically. And the FRED, Federal Reserve Economic Data website, has the banks broken down into two categories. One are the big boys, one of the little boys. And the big boys, we're seeing like a three and a half percent sort of delinquency or

distress rate in their credit products, stuff like credit cards, car loans, things of that nature, retail loans, let's say. 3.5% is not that much. And it's a lot lower than it was in 08. And there's all these other metrics that point to this being something to keep an eye on, but nothing to panic about. But then if you look at the regionals, the regionals are higher than they were in 08 at about 7%. And we talked about this and said, look, the regionals are really a thing that holds the banking system together because a lot of people are looking to get loans for homes and businesses and whatnot in the United States.

They use regionals. They don't use the big banks. There's a lot more competition there in terms of financial vehicles and financial institutions than there is here. And people take advantage of it. They don't always go to the big banks. There's a lot more competition there in terms of financial vehicles and financial institutions than there is here. And people take advantage of it. They don't always go to the big banks. With BTFP ending and loan losses looking like they're going to start piling up for the regionals, you are actually going to see, I think, Len, this thesis that people had a little while ago that you and me talked about briefly, but I don't think really dove into. A lot of mergers between the big banks and little banks, a lot of buy-ups and scoops.

I've been mentioning this for a long time. We didn't really dive that deep into it, but now it looks almost unavoidable. Does it not? For sure. If you look at the number of banks that are operating right now, and you look at this over the past few years, and you look at year over year, decade by decade, the number of banks have been going down significantly over the past 30, 40 years.

And what happens is through consolidation, bigger bank by smaller bank or two smaller banks merged become bigger bank. That's what essentially happens. It's just the customers still need to be served, but they're served now by whoever is going to be owning the corporation moving forward. That's exactly it.

You're going to have a lot of these smaller banks that are going to be bought up or merged, one of the two. That's the reality. This has been going on for a long time. And all you're going to have in the end is consolidation between a few big banks. It's going to take a lot of time to get there, but it's trending towards that direction.

Yeah, I'm keeping an eye on the BTFB thing. I think that's a huge, it's just a huge, it's a signal that it's just a huge, you know, it's a signal that things are not going that well when you end that program and a lot of banks have trouble. This is another thing I think that's like not priced in. How many people in TradFi were talking about how backwards the BTFP program was when it was released a year ago, when it started a year ago? It wasn't that many. People were happy about it in a lot of cases. We needed to do this to prevent a wider contagion, blah, blah, blah.

Now it's ending. We'll see. Bitcoin had a rip when that program launched, right? When we started to see SVB and other regionals wobble and fail in some cases, at least in one case, one major case. Let's see what it does this time. I mean, we're pushing 69,000 here.

We're very close. The floor on Bitcoin right now is 70,000, let's say, to make it an even number. The last time the Federal Reserve did QE cuts, bailouts for banks, et cetera, et cetera, and businesses was COVID, the price of Bitcoin was 5,000, 3,000, something like that. During that big COVID crash, it made it up to 70, right? That's what, a 20X-ish? 20X from now, we're past a million. Might be time to deploy, lads, as they say. Hard not to be all in when all this stuff is taking shape on the horizon. And it's not like you haven't seen it before. I think one of the things that people forget is that markets react in a way that seems irrational sometimes because the gap between what was going on 15, 20 years ago and then it happening again now meant that investors aged out or died or were no longer

managing money or were no longer employing the same strategies, right? They became defensive and started doing 60-40 instead of doing equities, for example, or stuff like that. Now, the gap between the crises is what? Three years? That's if you count COVID. If you just look at the regionals, it's like less than a year right now. You know what I mean? Everyone remembers what happened.

They know that the options are either failure, merger, or bailout. They remember what happened to Bitcoin last time. Come on, come on. It's not that hard to figure this out, right? You're going to wind up with people who make the right choice this time on the retail side. I think a lot of people are doing it. You look at the Bitcoin price, everyone kind of sees the writing on the wall, right? The implication is that everyone remembers and And that memory, you know, wasn't there 30 years ago, 40 years ago, or even in 08 wasn't there, right? And now it's there and it really does matter. You know, the communication strategy

and the way that these guys operate for a long time relied on stuff like that. And that's gone. That cushion is gone. What else could be said? Let's move on. Talk about US credit card debt. We talk about this

very frequent and and well the reason why i'm bringing it up yet again is because we hit another all-time high with respect to that it looks like bitcoin is going to hit an all-time high and the u.s credit card uh that is uh we're getting close ajoy we got to stay on this show 68 68 5 here we got to stay we got to stay on for a little while i think we'll talk about some nhl 94 i so what's going on here is that we have 1.13 trillion that is now being reported in credit card debt in the united states 1.13 trillion dollar let that sink in in q4 2023 there was a sizable jump in credit card balances and just in q4 of 2023 it increased some 50 billion dollars that's a five percent increase and of note during that period of time

we had the amazon prime day we had black friday cyber monday and christmas shopping so there was a lot of buying opportunities where people were doing it and funding it with their credit cards. So looking at this, I'm wondering how many people out there that are just one big car repair bill away from being wiped out. Who's going to be the ones that are going to be the bag holders here?

Immediately, it's going to be the people that issued the credit. So it's going to be a credit card or the bank. But ultimately, it's going to be us. If you look down the So it's going to be a credit card or the bank. But ultimately, it's going to be us. If you look down the line, they don't hold it for a very long period of time. Eventually, they give it up and we take it. Now, I'm going to go a little bit further here. How much debt out there is on credit cards that is MasterCard and Visa?

And I'm wondering, at what point are they going to be suffering hard? If it's 10% of the cardholders decide not to pay back their bills, is it 20%? I don't know what the number is, but they can't sustain a lot of people out there saying we're not going to pay back our credit. What happens to these companies? What happens to Visa or MasterCard if they can't function because they don't have any capital to function? This would have drastic impact on our economy because we're driven off this credit debt. Businesses can't operate without credit.

Maybe 30, 40 years ago, yeah, but not now in 2024. Something could happen here. A domino could fall that would drastically change the economy as we know it i think we are very close to that i'm looking at this the size of this credit card debt and it's just an indication that we are much closer to the end than we are the beginning huge bubble i just looked it up really quick here with co-pilot canadians spent uh in 2022, $11.7 trillion. The consumer debt number in Canada in the second quarter of 23 was 2.4 trillion. So to give you an idea of how much of that is credit card debt, let's say half of it, maybe a third of it. It's a big number still. That's just Canada.

If we look in the States, you probably 10 times that number for the population. You're talking $10 trillion. That's a lot of outstanding debt um if you factor that number into the gdp right which you should be doing i think the gdp counts credit card spending last i checked you know how much gdp is really just debt-based spending both on the government level and on the retail level is the answer all of it close to all of that no i don't see all of it it's a heck of a lot it's not but it's a lot but it's a lot it's a lot right and so that it's uh like you said it's scary any so like a little bit of a shake or wobble or a default or like a cascade of defaults you know if everyone has to get their tesla 3 battery changed at the same time um you're in a bit of trouble i think right so

yeah it's uh not a situation, that's for sure. Want to do some notable stories north? Or you got other things you want to talk about? No, let's go north with the notables here. Yeah, what do you got? Well, the Canada Pension Plan, the CPP. Well, we got wind this past week that the Canada Pension Investment Board, they sold off some properties.

And this includes a pair of Vancouver Towers, a business park in Southern California, and a redevelopment project in Manhattan. And all of these properties were heavily discounted. And notably, the one in New York was sold off for the price of just $1. And I would hope that they got that dollar and they bought Bitcoin. But if you look at it, Bull Bitcoin has a $200 minimum. So they have to sell 200 of these properties

before they can make a buy. Anyways, that $1 sale was to Boston Properties Inc. And that was one of the partners involved in that real estate deal. And they agreed to assume the CPP Investment Board's share of the project's debt. So they didn't just get that real estate deal. And they grew agreed to assume the CPP investment boards share of the project's debt. So they didn't just get that for a buck.

They took on the debt load as well. Now, if you look at the Canada pension plan, we talk about the solvency of this moving forward. As of December 31st, 2024, they have net assets. 23,

23, 20, right? No, sorry, 23. You're right. you're right okay okay yeah this is the future they they have net assets of 590 billion dollars right that's how much they have this is canadian by the way the previous quarter they ended at 576 billion dollars so that's a 2.5 increase in q4 which doesn't seem all too bad. But I mean, think about it.

All the people are drawing upon the CBP and more people are going to be drawing upon the CBP. It just makes you wonder how much longer before this number will start to go down and go down continuously quarter over quarter. They said that the quarter as a whole, they made a net income of 19.3 billion dollars but 4.7 was outflows so that's how many people are drawing from the cpp every month that's going to be going up more and more so yeah i'm looking at this the sale of the properties then they're just getting rid of these assets at a fire sale price there's a lot that's going to be going on yeah they could potentially start buying bitcoin they could put a very small allocation towards bitcoin and hope that carries

the rest of their portfolio but another thing that consider too is i went on google and i just typed in something about cpp that cpp holdings or i can't exactly remember what i put in but it was very benign but one of the results that came up from Google was, is CPP going to be around in 30 years? So clearly people are have questions about how solvent CPP is going to be moving forward. And a lot of people rely on it. It doesn't pay a heck of a lot. But a lot of people that are retired, they rely on this to help pay their bills. Man, imagine working your whole life paying into this and there's nothing there at the end that'd be a travesty but it's a reality it's a possible i want to show you something that uh ran during the nba all-star weekend um since we're on the topic it's interesting

that you mentioned cppib and their advertising talking about you know whether they'll be around in 30 years i always find it strange that these you know mega institutions things that we're told are like you know beyond just reliable they are the pinnacle of you know they're the bear stearns of the pension world yeah okay that's one way to put it yeah so look at this this this ad ran during uh nbl star weekend his canada pension plan benefits are secure thanks in part to cpp investments we're also doing the same for his son-in-law the cpp really wants me to know that they're solvent so much that they're running ads about how good their solvency is on NBA All-Star weekend?

Nothing to see here. Nothing to see here. It's just repeating it. What's the beginning again? I don't know, Len. What do you make of that? Why are they running advertisements? It's just repeating it at the beginning again. I don't know, Len. What do you make of that? Why are they running advertisements? It's really weird that they're running advertisements and then what is the name of that? What's the acronym for the bank account protection,

savings protection? Deposit insurance. Deposit insurance, registered deposit insurance. CDIC. CDIC. And I look at these two things and I'm like, that's, you know, very bizarre. If I start, you know, tweeting nonsense about, I don't know, the RCMP is about to fall or something like that. The RCMP is not going to start running ads about how they're not about to fall. And the RCMP is as strong as they... They're just not going to do it.

But these guys suddenly are both running ads about the legitimacy of the service and the backstop they're providing to Canadians. That's not a bit weird to you. It's a bit weird to me. The writing is on a wall. Why should they do this? Yeah, I just don't know. Why would you ever it's just a weird i don't know they have enough capital that they could pay out their obligations for you know decades to come but they're doing this as a way to increase people's

confidence in the product people obviously that are having concerns or questions about it that they have to do this they have to spend time and money to produce and put out and pay for the 15 people that watch the nba all-star to watch this on tv so they had to you know i don't even know why i had it on honestly i wasn't really watching it the dunk contest sucks every year anyways fucking he used to be better i'm not sure if you saw that one dunk contest the levine the levine aaron gordon dunk contest in like 2016 was the best one ever it was in toronto that was the best of all time there's one where they had michael irvin they had um michael irvin the receiver they had a bunch of nfl guys come in and do it and um yeah

that i watched a clip of that was fucking awesome even bo jackson dunked the ball of course and yeah it was just fucking great to see that's that's what i want to see i think griffey was in there too so i think they even had some baseball i did see that clip of ken griffey jr uh throw down a dunk now that you mentioned that that does uh tickle my memory a little bit yeah mark in the chat saying we have to uh keep talking we're at a key resistance we only have so much material we still got 15 minutes we can just wait 15 minutes i'll talk really slow so yeah on the topic of pensions cbc they published an article and this was written by one mr at least i think it's a mr benjamin shingler and his piece mentions that the canada's largest

pensions not just the cpp but collectively all the pensions within canada they have trillions of dollars under management and he says he writes that they are not doing their part to move their equity away from fossil fuels and he's writing that these investments are not aligned with climate goals i love this he says that other investment funds like the new york city pension funds for instance and others in france and the netherlands well they are ramping up their investments in renewable and also in green energy companies okay that's fine i just want to point out that pensions shouldn't be there to invest in ideologies. It should be trying to maximize the amount of money that they could pay to the people drawing from their pension plan.

That's what they should be doing. If they tell me that they're going to invest all in defense, I'm not a fan of defense. But if it makes the most money, go right ahead. Because in the end, people that are part of that pension plan, they want to draw from it. They don't want to have a portion or a percentage of it. And because, you know, things didn't go well, we invested in, you name some shitty project. It just didn't pan out. Fuck that.

I'd rather have them get the money. I don't care where it comes from. As long as it's legal, of course. They're not selling drugs. You wouldn't even care if it was legal. There you go. If you could buy that stock on

the stock market, it's available for sale. Anybody can buy it. Anybody should be able to buy it. And if they want to do it, if they want to buy that or an ETF that has that in the basket, fine. All the more power to them. So I they want to do if they want to buy that or an etf that has that in the basket fine all the more power to them so i just want to say benjamin shingler like you're wrong man you're wrong it's not about ideology it's about maximizing the amount of money that they can make for their pensioners that is it hard to believe that we're having this conversation at a time when pensions are coming under stress all over the world

the funniest thing about the cpp is that if you look across the border, every politician and commenter, from Ted Cruz to Jeffrey Gundlach and everybody in between, is talking about how the entitlement programs in the states are bankrupt. And they're going to have problems meeting their requirements inside of five years or 10 years. You think Canada's any different? Canada's economy is not growing at all. The CPPIB, by the way, doesn't even invest in Canadian equities. That's how bad things are here. So if you think that you're going to have the luxury of telling the CPPIB to get out of fossil fuels and also be able to afford a bag of milk in retirement, I got bad news. It's not going to happen. You have to be able to choose one or the other.

And for a lot of people, I think these luxury beliefs in stuff like green energy and responsible investing and DEI, great, man. If that's what you're into, fine. But when it comes time to either make ends meet or choose the luxury beliefs, everybody wants to put food on the table. And that's where we're going to land, I think, whether we get there sooner or later. Really just a matter of how many bumps in the road

on the way to an obvious outcome for 99.9% of people. Joey, your block clock is working again. Whatever you did, I think you just unplugged it and unplugged it. That's all I did, yeah. Whenever I have a power outage, which is infrequent, by the way, it causes an issue with my block clock. It loses connection and it never connects again until I disconnect it. Sorry, unplug the power and plug it back in,

and it works flawlessly at that point. Sometimes it goes months without coming off. It just works. I just want to give a plug to the block clock. It's a great product. I want to ask a question here. Wayfaring, okay, so I have to update my comments earlier. Wayfaring says he has not written a technical post.

So he's written a post, but it's not a technical post. He also wants to know, and I'll put it to the listeners, the CBP blog, longer pieces less frequently or shorter pieces more frequently? He's going to uh the piece here so let me know in the chat or just tag wayfaring on twitter and tell them what you want well you know i because we don't have a list like we have a list but we don't uh send out a mailing list and we don't send out the emails i don't think it really matters to people in the end for the

most part if we have the mailing list then they probably would be more inclined to pick one or the other because we're not spamming them with our stuff. Yeah, not yet anyways. They actively have to go to our website and read it. So in that respect, I would prefer to see a longer piece. Me too. I like the longer ones. I'll tell them longer.

Well, no, that's – don't. Let's not make an existence. That's not what I want. Yeah, I'm making an existence. This is democracy, man. If you guys want shorter pieces... If somebody wants to mail in a bunch of ballots to say that they want to have shorter pieces,

who am I to say they're not fucking legitimate? Especially if they come in after the closing date. We'll be counting them for three days, as we know. That's the standard for elections now. And in other jurisdictions like El Salvador or Argentina, they could wrap up an election within one evening. Over and over here it takes days and days run out let's do uh let's do one

more story and then i gotta hit the toilet um i don't know how much this mic picks up but i've been letting off some bangers here so i haven't heard why don't we uh why don't we do one more notable north story and then uh wrap it up do you want to talk about the first time homer sorry i do i want i actually do want to talk about this so this program is being scrapped okay yes and this is the cmhc program i believe right where if you're a first-time home buyer the cmhc will take on a portion of your costs and in return you will be giving them a portion of your home. They will own a portion of your property. So you have some, CMHC has some, the bank has the rest, basically is the breakdown.

Why was this program never even started, Len? Who used this program? Obviously not that many people. 22,826, to be specific. In how many years? And I think it was one year. Could be a little, anyways,

it was a hundred thousand. They were expecting to take advantage of this, but less than a quarter took advantage of it. Now, the question you're asking is who would be using this? The idea was for people that were priced out, just priced out of the housing market, then they could have the government pick up the remaining tab and they would

then be partial. You're essentially owning the whole. Can we, can we just discuss the sort of economic theory behind this proposal? If you're, if you're priced out of the market, okay, then that means the market is at a floor.

Let's say the floor at the moment is X. Okay. This is the floor of the housing market. I know where you're going. I, I totally agree. But it needs to be said for posterity and for the record. Okay.

If the floor of the market is X. Okay. And the government says to you, you can only meet the, meet the requirements of getting in the housing market. If the floor is X, okay? And the government says to you, you can only meet the requirements of getting in the housing market if the floor is Y, okay? And the gap between X and Y is 3%, let's say. Then the floor is going to move up because the government will always cover the gap between what you have and what you need to get in. That's the natural order of the market. If you add this sort of perversion and when you have that happen, what happens to the market land? It gets frothy.

Everything moves up in price, right? And you price out more and more people and then more and more people need the program. And before you know it, CMHC owns 20% of every property in the country that's been owned for less than three years or whatever the number is. Who knows? Then you start to talk about, okay, well, I'll just wait for a housing crash. We need a housing crash to get into the market. Well, not really because if the crash comes, CMHC is underwater on all their loans. Banks are underwater on all their loans and they can't let that happen. So what do they do? They just keep raising the floor with programs like this. It doesn't work. This doesn't work. If I can do this from the basement, okay, from the yellow chair, and you can do this from the basement, okay, in the swivel chair,

then why can't everyone else do this? Why don't these guys realize that they're just raising the floor artificially and costing people more money in the long term? What's the problem, right? I don't understand this. What's the problem, right? I don't understand this. It's very difficult for me to understand how this program makes it through a number of different reviews and policy lookovers and red teams and things like this. How does this happen?

Where's the gap? Where's the gap in understanding here? I think this is pretty clear, is it not? There's two things. There's politics and there's policy. Which side of this do you think this is pretty clear is it not two things there's politics and there's policy which side of this do you think it yeah good politics is almost always bad policy blah blah blah i know i know and if you subscribe to that theory then you can understand why this is going out there so it's just it's just a reality so that was the idea behind it it was going to inject uh i would not interrupt you narwhal has a good question in the

chat here i'll put it up for people who are on video is the government paying any of the mortgage or is the homeowner paying the full mortgage no question the homeowner from what i understand the homeowner pays for everything and including maintenance upkeep and so they take all the shittiness that comes along with owning the house the government will get a portion of it once you sell it and so they're they're just there to help you get in but once you get out they're going to be asking for their handout their their slice of the pie whatever it is coming to an end it's as of march 21st they are not going to be accepting any new or updated applications and there's going to be no approvals granted after march 31st and the program they said they had it budgeted 1.25

billion dollars associated earmarked for this but only 408 million dollars almost 409 million dollars have been utilized so in the grand scheme of things a quarter ish of the funding has been allocated to it but in terms of the amount of applications it's uh less than a quarter so yeah that's whatever another program come and go and it's uh just a footnote in our history it looks like a footnote in history that's it for tonight um well we just stay on for a couple we're 68 503 so if we stay on for another i don't know three four hours we should be there who's gonna edit the fucking audio my dog's probably taking his shit outside too there's that one guy that we kind of know that does those long fucking videos right and you just

it just goes on it's like six hour videos you just i'll tell you oh yeah yeah yeah i know you're talking about it's amazing what you can do if you're just high as a kite probably but if you're not then uh you know you're just talking to yourself sitting in front of a camera and you don't have you know um you don't have any obligations or uh anything yeah it's a tough labor market as they say that's it um good night and god bless uh we'll see you mark's chirping you man go to the bathroom mark's going off here get back to work corporate corporate let's do rotation mark i'm gonna take off for a bit you come in for me joey you and he rip for the next we're fucking out of here listen hang out for all-time highs if you're not stacking yada me and uh come back wednesday for the interview you like it with uh

d remind me d central central that's right i think i want to say decisive decisive is an old school uh toronto-based rapper but it's not him. Anyway, that's it everybody. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Take care. Film your hair.

We'll see you next time. Don't be a cock. Hold on. I got to do all the, all the streams here. Here we go. I think it does it automatically for Rumble. I don't know.

Good night, everybody. It's still going on. Don't forget everybody lots of other stuff on cbp media network including two whites and a blue me joey my brother-in-law mike and our friend will talk about all the problems millennials are having with finance romance and just getting by uh if you like cbp if you like the nhl 94 podcast i guarantee you'll like that one. Search for it. Two whites and a blue anywhere you get your podcasts.

We look forward to seeing you.