Clueless' – The German Verdict
They have already pumped endless amounts of money into the economy with extremely high budget deficits, and with a monetary policy which has already pumped in lots of money," Mr Schäuble said. "The results have been hopeless. With all due respect, [the] US policy is clueless."
Stock Markets Surge on Fed's $600B Plan
Stocks surged today after Wednesday's announcement that the Federal Reserve will purchase $600 billion worth of Treasury securities to boost the stagnant economy.
Canada’s Housing Market ‘Pricey, Not Dicey,’
Canada's housing market is moderately overvalued but not a bubble waiting to be burst, BMO Nesbitt Burns says. “All things considered, the Canadian housing market does not appear to be in a bubble, and is unlikely to suffer a U.S.-style collapse,” economists Earl Sweet and Sal Guatieri said in a research note. “A key and overriding difference is the quality of loan origination in the past decade, as well as other institutional factors such as mortgage insurance and recourse against defaulters,” they wrote in the report titled “Canadian housing: Pricey, not dicey.”
Canadian Mortgage Debt Tops $1 Trillion
Canadians are holding more than $1 trillion worth of mortgage debt, the first time the total has passed that level, and a 7.6 per cent increase over the past year.The gain in the country's total residential mortgage debt is in keeping with the 7.5 per cent average seen over the past fifteen years, the Canadian Association of Accredited Mortgage Professionals (CAAMP) said in its annual report Monday. Over that time, Canadians total mortgage debt has increased by 194 per cent.
Buy/Rent Ratio Shows Real Estate ‘Vulnerable’
Canadian house prices have rebounded markedly from the depths of the recession, hitting a fresh record in may and bringing the buy/rent ratio to about 1.85x. That means that, even excluding major factors such as taxes and maintenance, homeowners pay about twice what renters pay.
Housing Correction Possible: Carney
Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney agreed Tuesday that an abrupt correction in Canada's housing market is possible.Appearing before the Commons finance committee and responding to a question from Nova Scotia MP Scott Bryson, Carney said he was not predicting a significant drop in prices, but given how far prices have risen and the high level of Canadians' household debt, it could not be ruled out.
Canada's Real Estate Overvalued
Canadian house prices are overvalued, but not as much as those in Australia, Hong Kong or France, according to a new worldwide survey. The data published in The Economist magazine's annual survey shows Canadian homes cost on average 23.9 per cent more than they are worth. That's somewhere around the middle of the pack. The scale ranged from Australia at the high end, where homes are 63.2 per cent overvalued, to Japan at the low end, where houses are 34.6 per cent undervalued. Canada's house prices were up 4.5 per cent from one year earlier. And between 1997 and 2010, prices rose a whopping 70 per cent, the report said.
Canada Should Provide More Stimulus
The Canadian government and the Bank of Canada should be ready to provide more stimulus to the economy if the downside risks it now faces come to pass, the International Monetary Fund said on Thursday. The multinational agency said authorities were taking the right steps by winding down Canada's fiscal stimulus plan and halting an interest rate hike campaign started in June. But the IMF warned risks to the economic outlook have increased -- including the high debt of Canadian households and the impact of housing market weakness in the United States.
China's Takes Supercomputer Crown
China has overtaken the US as home of the world's fastest supercomputer. Tianhe-1A, named for the Milky Way, is capable of sustained computing The US scientist who maintains the international rankings visited it last week and said he believed it was 1.4 times faster than the former number one, the Cray XT5 Jaguar in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. That topped the list in June with a rate of 1.75 petaflops a second. The US is home to more than half of the world's top 500 supercomputers. China had 24 in the last list, but has pumped billions of pounds into developing its computational ability in recent years. The machines are used for everything from modelling climate change and studying the beginnings of the universe to assisting aeroplane design.
Housed in the northern port city of Tianjin, near Beijing, Tianhe-1A was developed by the National University of Defence Technology. The system was built from thousands of chips made by US firms – Intel and Nvidia – but domestic researchers developed the networking technology that allows information to be exchanged between servers at extraordinary speeds.
