The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP #159 (Other Notable Stories) - Odell v Saylor, FBI v Conferences, Canadian Housing Mess

Episode Date: April 17, 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: -Odell/Saylor drama-Hong Kong ETF-FBI and bitcoin conferences-Who is buying bitcoin?-Mt. Gox payments-Costco’s gold rush-Higher for longer-Australia’s cash problem-San Fran’s regarded business law-Canadian mortgages haven’t changed-Grocers robbing clients 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.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX 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 10203 that's good good timing okay where do you want to go for notables here okay we'll start off with the the persian rug pull story i don't know what this is i have no idea what this is i don't think well iran iran okay attacked uh israel and i i don't want to talk too much about this but i i just want to say

that obviously this impacted the price of bitcoin significantly and i know this could have been a story but this is more of a notable news if you think about it because there seems to be we're one step closer to a worldwide conflict how close we are to it i'm not exactly sure but we're certainly closer today than we were two days ago and for those unaware i'm anybody living under a rock it was iran they launched some drones against israel and obviously that's crazy that created a whole bunch of buzz throughout the world and man oh man what i found interesting specifically with it to do with the bitcoin though, is that it went down. It went down on a Sunday, I think it was, or Saturday.

Either one, Saturday or Sunday. It was the weekend when markets were closed. I would have loved to have known what would have happened if markets were open and an ETF was, those spot ETFs were being traded. That's exactly why I said that before. Yeah. And that's number one. Number two, a lot of volume you know people were selling en masse people were buying en masse too well bitcoin was reporting that i think 85

percent of their transactions were buying that day and so a lot of people wanted to buy the dip coinbase stayed up for some reason it's interesting because bitcoin price goes up volume is you know negligible Bitcoin price is a Coinbase fucking drops. Not once, not twice, but thrice, I believe. Bitcoin price goes down significantly. Volume is fucking through the roof. Coinbase stays up. Kraken died.

Kraken was down for quite a while, but Coinbase, what the fuck? How do they stay up through this? Did they mysteriously fix their fucking server issues just in time for this? Why couldn't you guys go down to that? I just wanted to note that. Did he mysteriously fix the fucking server issues just in time for this? Like, fuck! Why couldn't you guys go down to that? I just wanted to note that.

But, Mano, this is the whole thing. I don't want to make it too much about Bitcoin. It's just we are much, much closer to a worldwide conflict now that the United States, their affiliation with Israel, Russia, their connection with Iran, they've certainly gotten closer in the past few years, especially since their connection with Iran. They've certainly gotten closer in the past few years, especially since their conflict with Ukraine.

So this is fucked up. And now with Joe Biden out there, is he like Joe Bowden? Joe Bowden. I can't even pronounce his name. Is he a wartime president? I don't know. I don't know. He's a nap time president what do you mean

this guy doesn't fucking he's he's asleep at the wheel buddy what are we talking about here you gotta give him ice cream but he's like is he the guy that's gonna be able to smooth over tensions globally i i don't know man like this is messed up but i know what the thing i'm gonna be doing i'm not gonna be buying real estate i not going to be buying real estate. I'm not going to be buying gold, even though the price is going up. I'm buying Bitcoin, but I don't, you know, anything you want to add to this.

Oh my God. Somebody fucking wrote the thing in the chat. I don't want to fucking say it, but Oh no, I'm not looking at that. Okay. Listen, I would just say that if,

like I said earlier, when we were talking about this ETF thing and the price or whatever, if, if the market was open, when that missile story launched, no pun intended, everything would have been down by 10%. Everything would have been down,

maybe not 10%, like you wouldn't get a limit down, but you'd get like 2% or 3% probably in the S&P and in most major stocks and everything except Raytheon would have been down. And so people who are like,

oh, the rug got pulled on Bitcoin. It's not a good hedge. It's the only way to express risk on a Sunday afternoon or Saturday afternoon, whatever. There's no other market open to sell at that time. And so people who have Bitcoin are selling. That's all. It's nothing to worry about. We've been through this before. Remember COVID when the stock market was going limit down? There's no fucking circuit breaker on Bitcoin. It's dropping 40% in like four hours. That's what happens. That's all there is to it.

You got to be ready for that if you're a Bitcoiner. And although I do think that most of the time, it's going to be safe to say that 50% drops and whatnot are basically done and out of the question now. Those on weekends of seven or eight percent when you know joe boden says something that he shouldn't have said or slips going up the stairs of air force one or whatever like yeah that's gonna sting but you're you got conviction don't you ain't on you know like buy a little more who cares doesn't matter hey we did it to cbp yeah hang in there no big deal though it's funny the bull bitcoin cbp chat lights up every time it's lit up all the fucking time but i know the question is do you think the u.s are going to do anything and if they do no are they going to be just come on they can't are they just going to be setting boeing planes

and having them fly circles around them and hoping it drops out of the sky because that's the easiest way to fucking launch just dropping Just dropping door bombs on the crowds. Engines, anything. Wings falling off. I mean, look, there's something to be said. I know I was just about to say that it's unlikely because there's an election, but incumbents love wars because it provides a sort of unification effect, right? People will unify even behind a bad president if there's a war.

Look no further than 9-11 and George W. Bush, right? Arguably one of the worst sort of spoken presidents of the modern era before this guy. And he won two terms. So I think there's something to be said about that. The problem I think that the US has is that they're just, they're not focused. No one, it doesn't seem like the foreign powers who were being kept in line by the threat of US military action care anymore.

So, I mean, can they fund Ukraine and Taiwan and Iran? And like, can they do it? I don't know. Not without, war is inflationary as everyone says, right? And so not without pumping my bags, I guess, which is a silver lining in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foreigners and good us men and women, sad to say, but that's the state of affairs in the world today. Right.

Everyone's worried about their bags. No one seems worried about their bodies, but, uh, both, uh, going up in terms of, uh, NGU. So yeah, I don't know. Let's pay attention to it i guess what else can you say really it hasn't been that long right it's only been two days so let's see what happens the next week or so uh i'm sure that they'll find the right time to do something i'm talking about israel it it only makes sense and i'm not trying to justify what their reaction but

that's just a reality that That's the way things happen. You launch an attack on somebody. It's just a matter of time before you get it back. And Israel has the resources to do it. And they could do it covertly. They could do it just, you know, they have the means. They have the resources. They'll be able to do it.

And in terms of how drastic a retaliation is going to be, that's up for grabs. But the United States, i just wanted to just look at them really quick in the past two decades they haven't won a war right it's it's been you know they didn't win in vietnam either like like they they didn't win they haven't won in forever the afghanistan war was a disaster iraq iraq well no there's two different things iraq both of them they won they won convincingly convincingly and the army is not there to rebuild the army is there to obliterate and they did that they obliterated at both times so those were two they met their objectives and those aren't the state i mean in iraq i mean don't forget the name of the name of

the second iraq war the operation iraqi freedom like it wasn't iraqi obliterate it was iraqi freedom is that a dub for them like i don't i don't think so i realize i realize the goal in practice is actually just go in there and fuck shit up yeah five years yeah yeah we've heard it many times the u.s army is terrible at rebuilding and they're they're terrible at having people stationed there and rebuilding it's been decades since they've been there the u.s army is really good at coming back uh with ptsd and living in a tent until you die of a drug overdose that's what the u.s army is really good at and uh it's shameful they're doing that and they seem to be on track to start doing

that again in earnest uh in the next years. So I'm looking forward to seeing how that affects cohesion over there already suffering in a major way. I thought I heard the other day, this is a bit far off, but for you and I to talk about, but one of the reasons drone warfare has proliferated so much and will continue to proliferate isn't necessarily because it's sort of easy and technologically available now but rather because there's just so little interest in joining the military in the first world that they don't have any choice but to you know go through drone drone warfare could be yeah but it just goes to show you it's also very effective too is look at what's going on with yemen and i'm not sure how many drones they're using over there but they're using a lot of homemade stuff. Yeah, they're able to stop or stop.

They're able to significantly reduce the amount of traffic going to the Suez Canal. And if you got just a bunch of guy was with homemade rockets able to do this to almost. To nullify the US Navy and other navies out there that have so much resources behind them. Fuck, it just goes to show you that warfare could easily be like it's changing it's not like how many ships you have how many nukes you have it's how many drones you have too and you know it's asymmetry between the cost of production right like the u.s war machine is so full of bureaucratic red tape and nonsense that you know producing a patriot missile what a name by the way cost a billion dollars yeah cost dollars. I mean, that number's way off. It's probably like

10 million or something like that. But to take one down, uh, you know, the, the, the desert, uh, warfare crew spends 10,000 and, and you can't, you can't keep making that trade over and over again without losing. You have to figure something out. Right. And that asymmetry is going to come home to roost, I think, in the next little while too. This is the first hot war that we've had where we've seen some first world flexing in terms of what their capabilities are, right? And I think that it's been met with a lot of underwhelming results, don't you? Like how are things going in Ukraine?

Terribly. They don't seem to have a handle on the Israel-Palestine thing. They're sure as shit not going to get a handle on the Iran thing. And you mentioned the Suez Canal too and the Yemen-Houthi. It's not good. They're stretched too thin. Everyone knows it. If the US was as thin on the world stage as they are in the McDonald's lines, they'd be

in a lot better shape. But they're not. on the world stage as they are in the mcdonald's lines they'd be in a lot better shape but uh they're not they're they're very thin uh abroad in terms of military strength and military deployment capability and it shows starting to show let's transition to gold quickly sure price of gold this is something that i'm gonna be going like this the whole time hey needs a bit of gold hey jesus joseph and maria we normally make fun of gold because hey who's we i don't make fun of it i just think we're i think bitcoin's better it's the faster i don't make fun of it i have and i oh my god i i used to be a gold bug but then what happened with the repatriation or the inability

to repatriate gold to venezuela and russia uh changed my tune and anyways we make fun of them at least i do but it's now starting to move in terms of the price and it's up some 22 in the past six months and it's also up 10 alone and or almost 10 in the past month and this type of swing in the bitcoin world happens all the time but in gold world does not happen often but it's going right now it leads me to believe and i guess a lot of others that there's some big entities out there that are scooping up and stacking gold i just wrote about this two weeks ago in the letter there's tons of tons of eastern banks state and otherwise are buying this stuff up yeah it's not your bronies like you and i retail no that's not it's big entities entities that have the ability to print money or have access to big money and so this is like really fucked up stuff and even if you want to go a little bit further

down this rabbit hole silver too is also doing well it's actually outpacing gold yeah and if you want to break it down further silver is up 26 in six months and 13 higher in the last month both of those numbers are higher than what's happening with gold. And between this, you know, we also have Japan's yen weakening significantly in the past while bonds getting out of whack. And it seems like something is going to break.

You know, you look at all these things individually. They're interesting collectively though. It's like, Hmm, something's up here. And if something breaks, hopefully you have a hard asset you could rely on like Bitcoin. I think it's important. And I don't know what's going to break, but there seems to be some potential for what

I would call like an upward spiral almost, right? Where you're seeing like the price of gold move in a way that's not healthy in terms of its relationship to economic stability, political stability, which a lot of people say is what it truly hedges against, not debasement, but rather stability issues. And then when you also talk about the relationship with rates, have you seen the alligator jaws stretching with rates? When you see rates go high like this, or stay low, I should say, or I can't remember the nature of the thing, but the relationship is supposed to be inverse of the other. And instead we're seeing this widening. And I don't know, when I think about the Bitcoin gold ratio, if there is such a thing,

we usually move a lot faster and a lot harder and a lot more violently when gold makes moves up. When gold breaks 2,400 again in the next couple of hours, I was looking during the show here at the price of gold, it's back up to like 2,380 or something. When it gets to 2,425, 2,626, are we a week away from, I shouldn't say a week, but like if you had to guess this year, Len, are we going to get like a hundred dollar gold day or a thousand dollar gold day? Or because with the wars and with money being debased at this record pace and inflation seeming to tick up again in the United States, like it just seems to me like there's room

for gold to just hit an everyone gets it moment like we talk about in Bitcoin. And whether I like gold better than Bitcoin or not, there's a lot of people who like gold quite a bit. And I think the Bitcoiners are guilty of having this issue where they talk about gold moved 1%, that's crazy, blah, blah, blah. Like Bitcoin moves 1% an hour, no big deal. 1% in gold is like the entire market cap of Bitcoin. Do people realize that? No. It's an overstatement.

But for Bitcoin to move at the same rate gold is, some of these small-ish gold moves in terms of percentage would require enormous market cap jumps in Bitcoin. And so it's something to watch when gold moves. Whether we agree or disagree with that camp, we're fighting the same battle. And if one is moving, I think you can expect Bitcoin to move too. It's kind of been a laggard the last few weeks, but I think it's going to eventually pop back up.

Well, you know what? There's another story about gold. I think it's a good time to bring it up because we talked about Costco selling gold some time ago, selling gold bars. And CNBC published a story and they're indicating that Wells Fargo estimates that Costco is selling somewhere in the vicinity

of 100 to $200 million of gold bars a month. That's Costco United States. And they've only started just selling these gold bars in the latter half of 2023. And we discussed this at length in the CBP archives. Check it out if it's still up. So what you could buy with the gold, if you're a U.S. citizen or U.S. Costco member member, these 24 karat gold bars, they say the item is non-refundable because Costco has this wonderful refund policy where you can bring back a mattress from 20 years ago, they'll take it, but they're not going to

take back the gold bars for obvious reasons. They're saying it's a limit of one transaction per membership with a maximum of five units for every US Costco member. This is up from two per member. So initially, when they first started selling gold bars, they is up from two per member so initially when they first started selling gold bars they were only selling two per member max now it's up to five per member so crazy increase this number in canada it's a little bit different you could do one transaction every seven days per membership but a maximum of two unit two units per canadian member so even if

you buy you know one this month one next month they're not going to sell you more than two units per canadian membership that's it so uh yeah one next month, they're not going to sell you more than two units per Canadian membership. That's it. So yeah, a lot of people, they're buying this gold from Costco. From what I could tell, it's around a 2% premium from what they're selling it, from what spot price is, which I'm not sure if that's reasonable or not, but that's what Costco is selling it. But people are buying this on a pretty good clip.

They're hard for hard assets, but good luck transporting this shit. And how much time before Costco starts selling Bitcoin or maybe Walmart starts selling Bitcoin? Like if, you know, if they're selling these hard assets, why not sell something else? Like digital. High quality, high quality engagement farming,

those tweets. Costco will probably not sell Bitcoin for a while. I do think though, Len, if you look at who shops at Costco, you know, that's not really the person you would have expected to be buying ounces of gold, right? Doesn't that say something to you that people who are going there to buy, I was there on Sunday, shopping carts full of toilet paper, soil, and granola bars. Throw in this $2,400 one ounce. It's pretty crazy, right? That people are buying this stuff

at such a clip that obviously the demand was high enough that they increased the total number you could purchase. Right. I think the, the number they, they gave us 200 million. Uh, I would expect it to go up when you, I mean, the price of gold is going up. So that number is going to rise naturally, but I think the demand is there. People realize like, man, I got to get some of this stuff before it's too late or it's not being sold or whatever. It's not good. I've said this so many times on the show that the problem I think governments have isn't necessarily one of policy. I think the policy has always been spotty. But the thing they excelled at was narrative. Me and you couldn't go somewhere and get information and then have an honest conversation with real data and say like, man, there's problems here with inflation. I'm being sold a false bill of goods, 3%, but my milk's up to eight bucks a bag or whatever it costs now. Now, the narrative thing is really going sideways on them. So much so that people at Costco are buying gold bars like that to me,

signposts, man, plant it. Like this is, this is one of the signposts on the road to, you know, and it really problems with inflationary pressures, right.

And inflationary expectations. That's, that's saying something to me. Well, let's talk about another signpost because Australia, there's a bank over there. TFTC was commenting on this, not just a bank in Australia, TFTC, was commenting on this. Not just a bank in Australia, but also one in Canada.

I'll talk about that in a second. I love that. I watched that clip like five times. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Because the one in Australia is interesting because it's a woman. She approached her bank looking to withdraw some cash. And she went in and she was told there's no cash to be given out. And it's funny because

she was interviewed by these panel of news journalists and they're asking like you know what's going on like what happened there and so this lady was saying that you know they just simply don't have cash anymore and these guys were asking why can't they just simply go in a vault well the reality is they just don't carry it they're now going to a cashless system everything is going to be digitized and right so good luck by kyc free bitcoin in that situation and also tftc also um tweeted out a canadian bank was doing the same thing where they were preventing somebody from withdrawing three thousand dollars so they could buy i think it was a car or something whatever it was there's a car buddy has a car off a buddy yeah yeah so they were trying to get three thousand dollars simply to just purchase the car but the bank was preventing them from doing it it's your money you know like you worked for it you deposit

into the bank so you could have access to it in the future and they're preventing you from getting the physical version of that money man that's scary stuff but you know what this was predicted it just it's now happening sooner than i thought was going to happen so it's pretty fucked up it's insane man the the the way that the teller at rbc talks to the guy who goes in and wants three grand three grand is not even that much like three three,000 is a mortgage payment, right? That's a, what is it? One buggy full of Costco items, right? Yeah, I hear what you're saying, right? You're getting a lot of pressure from both sides of the equation there. Look, the Canada one is the one that I watched. And the way that the teller talks to the guy, Len, is incredible to me. The disdain she has for the guy who's like, that's $3,000. I just want $3,000 in cash.

Well, do you have a note from your friend saying you're buying his car? He's like, a note? Who cares about the note? Just give me the money. And she's like, no, I'm not going to give it to you. And to the guy's credit, he's like, I'm not leaving here until I get the money. I think this is shameful, embarrassing, ridiculous, but expected. Anyone who's been to a bank to pay for a major home rental project or pay for a car or whatever, they always want to give you a bank draft. They never want to give you cash. I had to get my roof done a couple of years ago and paid in cash.

And the bank teller gave me a hard time just the same way why don't you take a draft I don't want a draft I want cash I want $10,000 in cash give it to me in bills I'm not asking you for a bank draft

oh well bank drafts are less likely to be frauded I don't need to be I don't care about the fraud the roof is on my house already. I just need the money now. It's not a problem. This guy went through the same thing for a third of the money, Len. That's really the big story. That's not much cash. So what is the threshold now that banks are going to ask for that information on? Is it 3,000? Is 1000? What is it? It's, it's crazy to me that people just go through this. And I tweeted today that like a lot of people say, Oh, they

have to do this for fraud. Like that's the fucking problem. And you're the fucking problem. Stop accepting this behavior. This is not acceptable. It's your money. Did you earn it? Did you work for it? Did you store it with them? Then you should be able to get it anytime you want for any reason. If you want to dance around in your room and film it in slow motion while the cash falls from the fucking ceiling, they got to let you have it. It's all there is to it. There's no other questions to be asked, but we're in this mode now where everything is fraud prevention and safety and we got to make sure we got to double check. You got to give us a receipt. You got to give us an invoice. I don't have to give you anything in bitcoin that's the way it should be let's talk about this yahoo news story about what's going on in san francisco this story

joey is absolutely bonkers okay so this this san francisco board of supervisors i want to get on that board by the way because of what they're trying to institute here i i gotta get in they're considering a remarkable policy that would allow people to sue the grocery stores should they close too quickly i'm not talking about closing in a today i'm talking about shuttering doors shutting the doors yeah and say that's it so in this case they're trying to make a case that if a grocery store closes too soon they could people could sue so you have to operate within good faith and so what you're saying is the notice of closure has to be six months although there could be some exceptions granted but six months at least is out of the minimum that you have to announce you're going to be

closing completely and shutting so they're saying should stores close without proper notice people who are impacted by this closure they will be entitled to sue the closed store for damages now this is totally bonkers because if you are a store if you've opened up in a particular area and you want to do business over there you obviously are doing so in good faith. You want to make money. You want to serve the community. You want to stay open. You're not just there to open up and close within a month because obviously that is very costly and it may tarnish your reputation in doing so.

But the reason why these stores are closing is because of the unsafe environment, which is San Francisco these, between drugs, crime, insurance going up, all this shit. It piles on to these store owners that they just cannot operate in this environment. It's no longer profitable to do so. It's absolutely loopy, this whole thing. And now you have to give six months notice. It's not like you're leaving a job and you're giving two weeks notice. months and if you do that what the hell is going to happen in that six months so these people they they created an unsafe environment and now they're forcing stores to give a long lead time before they're going to close shop what this is going to do is going to

encourage stores not to open up over there if you are a franchise say mcdonald's or anything like that and you have an opportunity to open up one more store in san francisco you're gonna say fuck that i want to do it it's just not worth it the headache and so you're gonna have a lot of these fucking stores a lot of these companies they're gonna come up with these realizations setting up shop is just an headache that's going to potentially lead to a lawsuit later on should they close up because of any reason so this type of idea this type of policy this type doesn't make sense you got to let this fucking thing just work on its own provide these store owners an opportunity to thrive don't fucking set them up for failure and then sue

them at the same time for when they want to leave but yeah that's all i gotta say what a fucked up story this is pretty wild that uh there's a question at all from politicians or from people in california san francisco specifically in this case about why businesses aren't staying open do you not see how dangerous it is there like what are people looking at did you did you, by the way, this debate that happened for unknown reasons, honestly, between DeSantis and Newsom a couple of weeks ago, maybe a couple of months ago now? About the two, yeah. I didn't watch it, but I heard about it.

So to give you some context here, okay, DeSantis pulls up a chart, a map of San Francisco, and he's like, have you seen this clip? No. He pulls up a chart of San Francisco, and in the chart, it's completely covered in POIs, in plotted points of interest. And he's like, for people who wonder why San Francisco is failing, this chart is pulled

from an app where people disclose where there's fecal matter on the sidewalk. And it's literally every square foot of that city. People have been reporting this stuff over the last six months. Why do you think people shit on the street? Well, because they're not mentally well. And when you have that kind of dangerous population roaming around, truly zombified in a lot of cases, thanks to the drugs they're on, which in some cases are provided by the state or paid for by the state, what do you expect to happen to stores? You're going to get break-ins, you're going to get robberies, you're going to get theft, you're going to get all kinds of stuff.

And broadly speaking, you're going to get people unwilling to do business there. So the business you have is people coming in to steal shit. And the people whose business you want are unwilling to go because it's too dangerous. What do you think is going to happen? Of course, they're not going to go or they're going to close down. law. You got to stay open for six months. Have you heard anything like this in your entire life? No, it's ridiculous. It doesn't make a total.

It doesn't make sense at all. If you have to open up shop, you have to do it. It's, it's batshit. And again, it's, it's this idea that you as a business owner,

Oh, the government or the people, some, some level of loyalty. And loyalty and honestly, some percentage of your bottom line, even though you're not getting anything for it and arguably are being left worse off. That's not how business works. Any smart business person will just go, yeah, no thanks. I'm not going to do business here, like you said. McDonald's or mom and pops or anyone. And pretty soon people won't live there. And after that you know there will be no grocery stores for the few people that are left and you can kind of see where this goes right i

don't know i don't know what the draw is in san francisco anymore like well who's living there and why at this point barry bonds fans and i guess a lot of it right like yeah yeah yeah yeah there's yes i mean silicon i'm not sure if they live in a city or if they somewhere else but i'm you know from i know a couple of years ago like rent and just housing in general was so fucking expensive in san francisco just as a result of the fact that it the it sector was paying people so much money yeah i think so and so it was driving up the price of homes over i'm not sure if it's still very expensive to live over there i don't i have no idea i think i think it is

i'm pretty sure it is so imagine whatever it's so much for your housing exactly the taxes are super high you can't like you know you you can't drive your fucking car there's no there's nowhere to drive the traffic is insane all over californ. People pissing on themselves and stabbing you in the street. Why would you want to raise a family there or whatever? You can't. You can't. End of story. There's nothing else to it.

And then the athletics are leaving to go to Sacramento or something. It's just getting worse in the Bay Area. The Lakers are going to be forced to sign LeBron James' son next year. You can't stay. You can't stay there. Are they actually doing that? They might. Listen, tomorrow night, thank God plate's coming here at 5

because tomorrow night at 7.15 or 7.30, the Lakers are playing the Pelicans in the playing game, and it's going to be fucking awesome. I can't wait. Sorry, the Pelicans. New Orleans. Do you know LeBron James is in year 21 right now? Yeah.

He's got more points, minutes, rebounds, assists, steals this year than every other year 21 player ever combined. Okay. Pretty good. That is very good. How many was an offensive player in a year, a defensive player in a year? There's none of that stuff.

Oh, it's just MVP. He's won, I think, four or five MVvps he should have won for like a decade straight but there's voter fatigue obviously like there isn't every sport whatever how many rings does he have uh he's got five i think four yeah and the other guy that um they you know they compare him to like mj yeah all he did was win and he didn't win it. Yeah. Didn't he win that one year offensive and defensive player of the year? He did win.

He did win DPO. Why? Yeah. It's like, how do you do that? I was firmly in the MJ is better than LeBron camp, but I got to tell you, Len,

like the last year or so. There's a discussion there for sure. One that maybe I am not willing to have right now, but in five years, 10 years, when LeBron retires, there's a discussion there for sure one that maybe i am not willing to have right now but uh in five years ten years when lebron retires i can look back on some of the stuff this guy was able to do one guy was one guy won a lot and he was mugged for the first few years by like the pistons and so forth like after yeah you know if you look at the place and i you know i'm not much of a basketball fan but i've seen a lot of the highlights the guy was you know if you if you do

it nowadays it's cancel culture you can't even fucking do that yeah maybe can i can i convince you that can i convince you that even michael jordan thinks that there's a conversation to be had between him and lebron and that's why the last dance was released famously private guy uh suddenly goes through a six-hour media release talking about how great his career was and how difficult it was for him to win. I think even Jordan thinks there's a conversation to be had. There's always a conversation, but the reality is,

I mean, I'm not a huge basketball fan. I'm going to go with the guy that has the most rings and is more, I guess, more rounded as an athlete. You know, he did play double a baseball you can say what you want about that he didn't hit all that well but he stole quite a few bases to play baseball is a very difficult thing to do when you haven't played baseball before to play any professional baseball and basketball are different sports too like i definitely are yeah speaking from experience like i i'm a basketball player first but a lot of the

skills and even the body type honestly trans he's a tall lanky dude yeah but doesn't it doesn't baseball yeah right and he was able to do decent look he didn't hit all that great but what fucking experience was he you told me you didn't watch the last dance i didn't okay so shame on you number one number two there's a full episode basically dedicated to the transition to baseball and back to basketball you would love it you would love it i probably would that's it's like it's like the way he treated his body and the training and space jam is mixed in there too by the way i never watched that space jam is an all-time great movie but anyway it's it's good you should watch it people

should be honestly like deriding you and and spitting on you on the street for not watching me either way you know what i gave it an honest effort and i tried watching it and within 10-15 minutes my mind started to wander and once that happens i'm no longer in it and there's no reason for me to continue doing it when i'm into, my mind won't wander. I'm committed to it. 100%. But when I start, you know,

having wandering thoughts, I know myself. I'm just, it's just no reason for me to do it. I could power through it, but I'm not going to thoroughly enjoy it. So I'd rather do something else. Fine.

Fine. That's anyway, let's do, let's do a couple more stories here. Talking too much side content. You know what? The side content is fun. I fucking talk about that all day, right?

Especially, you know, old NHL. The Canadian budget comes out tomorrow. That's big. We could spend some time on this if you want because I think we should. I think we should. Well, I'll just lay the table for you and you could just drive me in here.

So there has been a lot of announcements in the past few weeks months or so by um the canadian government so you had ministers fanning out throughout the country with a whole bunch of different announcements but this week there was a couple interesting ones uh number one we had this 500 million dollar fund for young youth mental health so so decent amount of money and it's for a decent cause they're saying many canadians right now are facing stress and anxiety due to the list is what do they put on there what do they put on the list war geopolitical unrest climate change climate change absolutely climate change, absolutely that, and financial strains.

Interesting. Yeah. So because of a lot of this, you know, young people need access to some sort of support. This 500 million will hopefully provide them

with what they need as a way to address these issues. And the second interesting thing that was announced this week is that canada is going to start allowing 30-year amortization mortgages but it's comes with a caveat here because it's not everybody's actually sure right beyond that it's first-time home buyers yeah yeah and that yeah also on new homes so you're really narrowing down who's going to be able to get so

if you think about this now i'm using through the lens of myself living in the greater tunnel area what's a new home that's going to be for available for first-time home buyers it's going to be condos pre-construction right like yeah or like these towns these like you know rocket ship shaped uh for under a million like because how much yeah if i look if i look at like water down uh which is just adjacent to burlington here for people who are out of the loop there's new condos going up for like 800 starting at 800 so i mean you're going to be everything you want to do is going to be on another up another flight of stairs basically in a in a town like that.

Yeah, so I'm looking at that. It's really, this is specifically for young people who want to get a pre-construction. And I don't think it's really for townhouses, detached, no way, because young people don't have the capital required to qualify for a mortgage, even with 30-year amortization. It's going to be specifically for condos.

So maybe this is going to be helping out pre-construction for the next little while, which has been taking a beating. A lot of people are walking away their deposits. I'm not sure. Well, they need to force more supply onto the market because rates are too high to get capital. And without buyers, what do you do? So you have to, again're you're sort of pulling

the wrong side of the lever here but this is what they do right so well another thing that they announced which is really good and i'll throw it over to you is that they're forcing mortgage lenders to have a direct link to cra to get access to information so they're talking about it they're talking about it oh i thought this was not yet not yet implemented no but they realize there's a problem at least they're saying they realize there's a problem yeah and the rationale for this is because there could be some fraudulent documents out there that is enabling people to getting access to funding so obviously they you know have a greater pool of people potentially buying raising the price so if you could weed out the people that are fraudulently submitting documents and getting approved, then there's less people out there buying and you can lower the price of the home.

So yeah, that's the idea behind it. But yeah, that's basically, I'm not sure if you want to add anything else to this, but that's what happened this past week. This is like a total joke, right? I think it's a poorly thought out policy, not because the people who are thinking about it are just doing a bad job, but because there's an unwillingness to discuss what the real problem is. The real problem is that there's not enough supply and that they keep bringing in more demand. There's an unwillingness by both major parties in Canada to say decisively, we're going to cut immigration or stop it outright because this is a problem that we're having now. It's causing significant issues in both social cohesion and in economic well-being for a huge number of Canadians of all ages.

Without willingness to have that discussion, you have to come down on the side of what basically amounts to stimulative policy choices, right? If you extend amortizations, it allows more people to buy houses. More people buying houses pushes prices up. That's not that hard to figure out. The other thing they added was now you can take $60,000 from your RRSP to buy a house instead of $30,000. Well, I wrote this in the newsletter. This is, I think, good research from CBP, honestly. The average home buyer in Canada, first time home buyer in Canada now, or in 2022, I should say, was 36 years old. Let's say it's 37 or 38 now. I think that's fair. It's

not too far out on the curve. Let's say it's 38. You get a 30-year amortization and you pull your $60,000 out of your RRSP. Let's say you had 60,000 in there, probably unlikely, but you pull it all. Are you telling me that you're going to now retire when you're 70-ish years old with 60,000 less in your RRSP? Plus- I think you're forced to pay it back, right?

Over 15 years. You have to pay it back, but don't forget that you're paying it back when you're at a higher marginal tax rate. You're paying it back during your prime earning years now. Instead of paying it back between 25 and 35, you're paying it back between 38 and 50. And so you have this problem where you're taking from all sides in ways that we just never were

before. And you're forcing people to work longer. And I wrote in the newsletter, is it like an end-round way to ease the burden on the entitlement system, the pension system? Maybe, I don't know. Yeah. You put people in these positions where they're- It's fun to work with a land value tax return, if I can call it. Solve every problem with that. any consideration being given to the second order effects, like making people work until they're 70 and having to presumably put off family formation until mid-40s. You can't take a mortgage, have $60,000 in debt. And it is debt, by the way, because if you don't pay it back, you have to pay taxes on it, like income. And as I mentioned, you're in a higher income bracket,

it would really sting. If you don't pay your RRSP withdrawal back between 25 and 35, it's not going to hurt you as much. Yeah, you'll pay a little income tax on it, but you will own the house. If you are making 90 or 100,000 at 50, and you have to pay your taxes back, well, you're going to have to pay suddenly a $30,000 or $40,000 bill on $60,000. It's going to be expensive. And when they come up with these policies, I just wonder if there's any real consideration being given to these second order effects, because it doesn't seem to me like there is. It makes it very difficult for Canadians. And really, like I mentioned, the price pressure is positive. It's not negative. These are things that will inflate the cost of homes. Everywhere we look all over the world, not just here, but everywhere where there is government

support, either policy or subsidy or whatever to affordability, it just makes the price go up. Government becomes the agency or the body who bridges the gap between what the actual cost is and what the inflated cost is thanks to these programs. Everyone pays the price. And then at the end of the day, if you look down the road 10 or 15 years, these policies, like I wrote in the newsletter, may be moot because I don't think Sussex is going to be red for too much longer. But the point is that there's, again, this unwillingness to discuss the real problem, which is there's not enough supply and there's way too much demand. The price is a symptom of

this problem, but there are other things that would be easier to do. Maybe not politically palatable for the moment, but easier. And I appreciate that there's a need for low wage labor by big corporations, but it's really starting to throw things out of whack all over the place. And listening to Premier Ford today, making a transit announcement in Milton, he's talking too about how Ontario grew by a million people the last two years. A million people the last two years, that's a huge number for Ontario. And they're all in the same hundred kilometers you know basically from hamilton to toronto uh scarborough whatever milton that's a

huge number for canada never mind just ontario yeah exactly right yeah and so that's the thing and we talk about this all the time with a million people coming in every year of all stripes and and uh and designations you know in terms of pr uh immigrant status and whatnot they're all going to the same three places it's vancouver it's gta and it's probably ottawa right like i don't know where else they do montreal i know they do their own immigration but probably there's a lot they're they're not landing in fucking regina right and so you have these problems popping up in the major metropolitan areas in the country the fix is not telling people they can take more of their savings that they don't have or use their home savings

account that they have no money to put into the fixes gotta build more houses and we gotta stop we gotta slow the demand we have to and there's an unwillingness to do that and so until that changes you're gonna have the same problems i think canada for a number of years, this century, they were letting in about a quarter of a million people per year. Yeah. I'm not sure if that is the magic number, but that's what they were doing for a number of years. And, you know,

maybe it's time to revert back to that. I'm not sure if, I don't know, just throwing out an idea because I know that from COVID, when they shut down the economy, there was a stoppage of immigration. So there was very few people coming to Canada for obvious reasons. And then once things opened up, then they ramped it up to try to catch up what they've lost during the closure.

But then it seems like they continually increased that number coming in, and here we are. So yeah, it's creating a strain on the housing system and you see a lot of students here seven students for in living in a basement for instance like there's seven is seven is conservative i want to add one more thing before we wrap up oh i have one more thing i just want to add i'm not going to be very long i just want to see if you want to talk about it but yeah go ahead sorry so just one more thing here from the scotia bank letter i'm going to write to write about this in the research report this coming week because this is obviously

a huge story. Scotiabank has a couple of great stats in their letter. And I just want to read you a paragraph here. New imbalances are also emerging. This is a federal budget preview. The federal government has had to lean heavily on corporate taxes, which have doubled in real terms over the past decade, doubled To offset direct program spending that has shot up 40% in real terms over the same period, even as GDP growth has turned out a mere 17% gain.

What? Well, I want to see what's per capita too. That's probably another one that's missing. A public sector footprint has grown with expenditures. Operating costs in fiscal year 24 were pacing at 3.6 year-to-date growth through january despite earlier plans for a contraction 3.6 growth plans for contraction those are things in that tribe as the rest of the economy normalizes the federal government will need to right size as it butts up against the limits to its spend then tax approach there's no money for this and there's no more taxes to grab. They're at the

limit of what's possible unless you just do deficit spending. And that's not feasible. You saw the article from CBC. Economists are at least predicting that they're going to be raising some taxes in tomorrow's budget as a way to help offset the money that they have. Who are they going to raise it on? Loblaw? I don't know. Is Loblaw the last story? Yeah.

So that may be. I'll just be quick. The grocery store markup, apparently there was an exposure on this and they're raising prices quite a bit. I'm not sure if this is factual or not, this leak, but a lot of things are being marked CBP economist Boomer had a comment on this because I sent him this story in our CBP chat. We have CBP chats with everybody. He makes a good point.

There's some data maybe missing there. But I think the bigger story is that we're kind of in this place now where clearly there is a friction between the public and the corporations, principally the grocery stores, about why affordability is so low. And these guys, we've said in the past, are really low-hanging fruit for the average person. I went to the store today to buy milk, salsa, olive oil, bananas, cherry tomatoes. What else did my wife have me get? I forget.

I think that was it. And looking at the prices for some of this stuff, like a bag of milk, I honestly haven't looked at the price. It's $8, $7.99 for three quarts of milk. And I don't remember it being more than six bucks two, three years ago. And now it's up to that. Bananas are expensive too. We're eating still quite a bit of meat, but we've cut back in a lot of places. I love having, for example, mini wheats in the house or sugary cereals in the house. I just don't do it anymore because the box of cereal is $10. Holy fuck. Yeah. Like Cinnamon Toast Crunch, I got it on sale the other day. It was like seven bucks, but it's usually $10 for a family size box. Crazy. And it's less

than it used to be too, right? Anyway, all this to say that, again, the problem isn't necessarily with what's going on in terms of pricing. Pricing could have always been bad. The problem is the narrative now has completely gotten away from the powers that be, whether it's corporations in this case or the government. And Weston, I don't think the guy's a bad businessman. He's actually a very good businessman. But even he would have to admit that this thing would come apart at the seams if competition was allowed to arrive in Canada and really put down roots. But it's not. And Len, what is your view on that?

My view is that the only reason competition is not allowed to exist is because Loblawlaws lobbies so goddamn hard that there's not going to be anyone else available to come in or able to come in. I also read today that one of the big name Loblaws lobbyists is Jagmeet Singh's brother-in-law. Did you know that? No, that's- Yeah. So like, yeah, like there's ties everywhere, right? I expect some level of corruption or these sort of offhand relationships after a long time being in government, that's sort of natural. I don't necessarily think those relationships are bad. The same reason I expect a guy like Donald Trump, right? Everyone's like, oh, look, he knows this person. He's giving this person

money. Well, he knows everybody. There's always going to be a connection right but again the optics and narrative have really gotten away from the usual players and now it's starting to cause problems and the reddit posts that i shared with you guys on the weekend where they have all the loblaws um margins by percentage you know what was the markup on butter it was 50 gross margin on butter something like that 35 on sour cream like i don't need a lot of sour but that's eaten pretty good if you ask me you know remember not too long ago canada was thinking about having some sort of competition bureau set up to try to yes so that could be one one reason of many that would prevent competition from spawning in canada because if you have stuff like this while it may theoretically be

good for the consumer in the end it's harder for business to come in and operate in that time of environment it doesn't seem to be all that friendly if you know if you're thinking about it if you go work in a totally free environment versus one that has a lot of constraints you're probably going to opt to deal with the one that has more freedom. But that's just, again. And again, we also talked about how we have these packaging rules and why companies don't package stuff and send it to Canada anymore. We talked about the Amazon example, why you get your toilet paper in a box that's the size of a small car.

Well, too many people order stuff the size of a small car that day, and that's what they do. But you can't do that in grocery stores a lot of time. Anyway, it's not good. And I think one of the common themes of the show over the last year and a half has been that you're seeing now sliding in terms of people's willingness to accept the status quo. Um, you can't, you can't have that. You really can't have that in a society. You need cohesion. And right now you don't have it. And you're starting to see, you know, as I've talked about before, we've, we've done, I'll try and pick my words carefully for all our sakes. We've brought in a lot of people with a lot of conflict under the surface between different groups, ethnicities, economic statuses, races, whatever. We've done this. A lot of countries have done this over the years and

been successful. And to be honest with you, until recently, we had done it successfully. But the thing that makes it successful is economic success and the promise of a better life if you work for it. Without that, you get protests in the street where people are literally out there all day long, hooting, hollering, and waving flags. You get homelessness and drug addiction. You get lack of family formation, which forces you to bring in more low-wage people

because there's no kids being had. And when you have those problems, you get compounding effects. We're just at the tip of the iceberg i think len if this continues another 10 years i don't know what a lot of places are going to look like honestly i think they're going to look a lot worse have your own garden that's one way to help have your own garden have a cold card and uh you know it's a miniature for brush football and yeah brush football place miniature 94 anyway okay god bless everyone thanks for coming tomorrow plate liquor wednesday uh

sunny side digital taurus and uh we'll see you when we see you yeah don't be a cock gotta go don't forget everybody lots of other stuff on CBP Media Network, including Two Whites in the 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. If you like CBP, if you like the NHL 94 podcast,

I guarantee you'll like that one. Search for it, Two Whites in the Blue, anywhere you get your podcasts. We look forward to seeing you.