harry wrote:

Canadian property bubble,

House and condo prices have declined during the past 6 months to a year,
or have showed zero growth during that time frame.

The differences betweed US and Canadian residential real-estate markets
a

1) No ARM's, no no-money-down mortgages here in Canada.
2) Anything less than 25% down requires mortgage insurance.
3) Very little speculation done by the average home owner (ie - very
few second homes being purchased out of pure speculation)
4) We don't have the equivalent to Nevada, Florida, or other
locations where second homes used as vacation homes can be
built
5) We can't deduct mortgage payments from income tax, which limits
speculative home buying and bubble-forming price increases.
6) Our banks did not re-package mortgages into fancy derivative-
based products, and because of that our banks did not and do
not cut corners when qualifying potential mortgage borowers.

You can't look at the headlines about Vancouver or Toronto's high house
prices and extraplolate them to the rest of Canada.

followed by general collapse due to dependency on exports to the
USA.

We've had the loss of the Auto Pact, followed by 3 consecutive years of
the Canadian dollar being over-valued by 15% because it's been pegged at
95 - 99% of a US dollar. Still lots of oil, natural gas and electricity
being shipped to the US from Canada, but our economy is slowing becoming
less export-driven and more domestically driven.

After that Australia.
Saw it on Russia Today so it must be right. Kieser report.
He's been pretty accurate so far. ?

Don't count on it. Look for more pain from a handful of Euro-zone
countries way before Canada or Australia.

Mexico will continue to deteriorate, their self-destruction fed by
US-made guns flooding south across their border.

Conditions in the US will also get worse - "security" budgets will
continue to spiral out of control as the US wages it's "War on Terror"
(tm) against it's own citizens. The "War on Terror" is a lot like
fighting cancer with chemo-therapy: It doesn't seem to matter how many
good people you harm (financially, psycologically, morally) in order to
detect, apprehend or (rarely) kill a handful of bad people. The end
result will be to create a culture of control. What you see now is just
the beginning.

It's really sad to sit here in Canada and watch you Americans consume
yourselves over this terrorism pretense as you allow your gov't to
destroy the very ideas of personal freedom and liberty your country was
founded on. We watch your local TV news, your national 6:30 pm network
news (which reported last night that your restaurants and grocery stores
are now on the lookout for food poisoning performed by home-grown
terrorists). If I believed in a god, I would be thanking him that I'm a
Canadian living in Canada.