And we think we have it bad? From Bespoke Investment Group:

Even more reason to get myself to Canada.

I’m an Obama man. I have been since the beginning and I’ve been giving to him since he announced his candidacy last-last winter in Illinois. (Wow, it HAS been a long primary season.)

I’m also originally from Pittsburgh, PA. So the current primary race holds particular interest to me.

The latest controversy is centered around Barack saying the following:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Hillary is trying to accuse him of being an elitist and not understanding small town folk. It’s a complete distortion, but such things are par for the course for the win-at-all-costs Clintons. It’s also sad and telling that Hillary and McCain are taking the exact same line of attack against him.

I’m not sure how much traction Hillary is going to get out of demonizing Barack for calling people bitter, especially after he expressed regret for the poor word choice but refused to back down from the point he was trying to make. Now he’s giving it back to her. Hard.

Gotta love the guy’s unwillingness to back down, his ability to take lemons and make lemonade.

So here’s the thing, the bitter small town folk include my family back in PA. I came from a small, poor town. And I’m pretty sure that no one is going to mind Barack talking about how bitter and angry they are. I think they’ll respect his admission that he misspoke and listen to the real point that he was trying to make.

And he was speaking the truth. People have been left behind these past 25 years. The steel mill and factory jobs have left, only to be replaced by Walmarts and Targets and Home Depots.

By minimizing that anger or trying to paint it a nice uplifting hue of “hopeful” or trying to claim that Barack is selling the people of Pennsylvania short, Hillary is making the argument that the source of people’s frustrations aren’t really a problem. Or perhaps, they are just minor problems, but nothing so bad as to make people “bitter”.

I guess some people will respond to that. But you know who won’t?

The bitter people.

Allrighty then! The Fed seems to be involved in every news story in the states. They’ve lowered interest rates, they’ve saved Bear Sterns, they’ve denied the R-word for months and months until just recently. They are the only thing holding the US back from financial Armageddon.

And how are they doing this? By agreeing to exchange their nice, safe, backed by the “full faith of the United States” (whatever that means) Treasury bonds with anything the banks want to give in return. From the Wall Street Journal:

• Lent banks $10.3 billion through the discount window.
• Lent banks $100 billion in term auction credit.
• Lent securities dealers $76 billion through standard repurchase agreements.
• Lent securities dealers $34.4 billion through the discount window.
• Lent securities dealers $75 billion of its Treasurys in return for other collateral through its new Term Securities Lending Facility.
• Lent up to $36 billion to the European and Swiss central banks.

331 billion dollars. That’s a lot of lending.

But here’s the thing: The Fed “only” started with 900 billion dollars of assets to dole out in this fashion and only 500 billion remains. Here’s where we are now:

So the Fed can do what it has done one and a half more times before needing to get more assets from somewhere. Guess where???

Isn’t it bad enough we have to pay for the Iraq war?

Can we just go shopping again?

Sometimes there are stories that just bring it right home to you without all of the econo-talk mumbo-jumo. From The Telegraph via Paul Krugman:

Afghan farmers are this year sowing wheat instead of poppy - not because they have suddenly been converted to the argument that producing heroin is not in the national interest.

Market forces have been the deciding factor - with wheat prices doubling in the past year, and the street price of heroin falling, it is now more cost effective to grow wheat.

Yes,that’s right. We live in a world where it is cheaper to do drugs than it is to eat bread.

I’m in the market for a house in Ottawa with a bunker. Anyone have any suggestions?

Ok, this guide to emigrating to Canada is slowing to a crawl. The fact of the matter is, in trying to adequately back-post what we’ve done since starting the process in September and provided informative posts to help anyone looking to make the move to Canada, I’ve passed up numerous opportunities to post things on what is happening NOW.

On top of that, i think I just want to expand the blog out from simply being about emigrating from the US to Canada. I have an intense interest in finance and economics, as well as politics, so I am going relay a lot more of that information here, hopefully in a way that most people will find interesting and digestible. (Did you know that the world economy is melting down? It’s true….)

Also, as a techie, there might be a bit of tech talk. But again, hopefully in the context of Ottawa and Canada.

And of course, I will still recount the journey of becoming a Canadian permanent resident, an Ottawan citizen and at all times, try to maintain a US/Canadian angle on things.

I may live in NYC. I may be moving to Ottawa. But I was born and raised in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. And let me tell you, I am as big a fan of the Pittsburgh Penguins as there is.

After 5 LONG, LEAN years of watching a losing team… No, the worst team in the league year after year, the Penguins are considered a favorite to go deep into the playoffs.

And that path is straight through Ottawa, soon my new home. Straight through the team that bounced them in 5 last year.

So be it. Down with the Sens Army. Down with the red mile. Down with Ottawa.

I will say that during the 5 lean Penguin years, the Sens were always the team that I rooted for in the playoffs. I actually saw them play NJ in the 2003 conference finals. So I already consider myself a Senators fan.  And let me tell you, the Ottawa fans on the bus back to the city were a blast.

Right after the Penguins beat them in 5.

Oh boy, for those super compulsive types, this could begin your long descent into madness.

Real time exchange rate quotes for free. Watch the rate break new highs and lows!

I shrink the browser window into a tiny sliver of a browser window and keep it on my desktop.

So you’re in the process of moving your money into your new Canadian bank account. Let’s say that you have 100K to use for a down payment on a house in Canada, and 50K of money that you will invest. But you want to start moving everything 6-9 months ahead of time to avoid any exchange rate shock that might occur in the future. What can you do with your money after it’s in Canada?

Well, very little, actually. At least until you land. Legally, you are not able to buy Canadian mutual funds until you have a Canadian residence. You can buy stocks, either US or Canadian, but that can be risky for the down payment of a house.

So you’re basically stuck with a GIC, the Canadian version of the CD.

(Of course, even in the US, anyone looking to invest a down payment on a house isn’t going to look beyond a simple and safe CD.)

But the point is to highlight the surprising fact that one cannot buy Canadian mutual funds until they live in Canada.

What about US Mutual Funds? This is where it gets interesting. Canadian residents are not allowed to own US Mutual Funds.

That means, once you move to Canada, you cannot own US mutual funds.

Until you move to Canada, you cannot own Canadian mutual funds.

Shouldn’t this fall under NAFTA?

Since making our decision to move to Canada, I have surfed a lot of sites and joined some Canadian discussion groups and I have found a small but vocal minority of people who have emigrated to Canada who absolutely hate the country. They actually have a website to air their grievances.

Their complaints range from the difficulty in finding work to the fact that many of their high level degrees do not transfer to Canada. There are claims of some discrimination along with the typical hatred of government taxes. Some even complain about the weather.

It’s sort of sad. I sympathize with these people who have chased a dream and found themselves in a place that doesn’t live up to their hopes.

But here’s the thing, if you are moving to another country, you should really, REALLY know what you are getting into. You need to make damn sure that you will be able to get a job. If you have an advanced degree, you should be smart enough to inquire as to whether the degree will be considered valid in Canada. If you don’t like the cold, you need to do a gut check before moving to the Great White North. If hockey makes your skin crawl, you might want to think twice, three times and one more on top of that. Because it’s EVERYWHERE!

But if you’re firm in your choice to move to Canada, don’t dwell too much on these Canada haters or sites. I am certain that there are far more happy immigrants in Canada than unhappy ones. Happy people just don’t create websites to declare their joy with their new country.

My wife and I just returned from a week long trip to Ottawa. When we had originally made our decision to move to Canada, we thought it would be a good idea to actually go there during the winter to make absolutely sure we knew what we were getting into.

All told, the cold wasn’t that bad. It wasn’t brutally cold like I expected, which is a shame, because we were prepared with the best that Patagonia had to offer. In the end, it rained for two days, snowed for two days and the rest of the days were relatively sunny.

Where do we sign up?

We stayed at the Rideau Inn B+B which I highly recommend. The website may not be the greatest, but the place was nice, clean and well priced. The staff was friendly and the Inn is located right off the highway on Elgin, so there is quite a lot you can walk to.

Overall, it was a busy trip as my wife solidified her job offer, we sorted out all of our bank and money issues and we spent a couple days house hunting. By the end of the week, we got a decent sense of the neighborhoods and an idea of what it will be like to actually live in Ottawa.

Let me tell you, coming from New York City, I had the irrational fear of getting to Ottawa and feeling like it’s too small. Even though I’m worn out by the pace, size and hassle of NYC, I still think I would go crazy in a tiny little town and, although all of my research showed that Ottawa wasn’t one, I still wasn’t sure.

But after this latest visit, we realize that we saw scant little of Ottawa in August. We stayed mostly downtown and we didn’t see much of the commercial areas out in the outskirts of town. Going around with a realtor helped tremendously and we found loads of good restaurants.

Oh, and we played poker at Casino du Lac Leamy twice and won enough to pay for half the trip.

Yea, we’re gonna be just fine.