43
votes
What else is going on?
With all the noise being generated by everything that's happening in Israel & Palestine, I'm starting to feel like governments and large corporations are going to take advantage of this to push something under the radar that would normally be objected to.
For the sake of staying informed - is there anything going on that seems like it's not being given adequate attention? What's going on in Gaza is horrible and I have no capacity to affect change in that situation, all I can do is focus on things that I have some degree of influence over.
War is a great distractor - it distracts us (Canadians in particular) from the fact that our banks are making out like bandits while the rest of us are struggling with bills and skyrocketing inflation and interest rates.
But the banks never lose here. Unlike the US we only have five major banks so the competition is slim and the rates are all very similar. We also have some of the highest priced real estate and the lowest supply of houses in the G7. An AVERAGE price for a house in Canada is now $660,000 which means at the current 7%, even if you can scrape up a 5% downpayment, the average mortgage payment is $4390 a month. Plus taxes. Plus insurance. Plus maintenance. Plus utilities. You can kiss $5000 a month goodbye. Which means you should be making about 145,000 a year to buy an average house here. Just nuts.
Meanwhile, our largest bank, Royal Bank of Canada, made 41 BILLION dollars last year, an increase of 8% from the year before. We're just barely recuperating from covid and everyone is struggling with inflation and the banks are killin' it with record profits. But hey, there's a war going on so... well... that's worse.
(As an aside I called RBC and complained that my wife and I were paying too high fees for our bank accounts, so they actually cancelled ALL our fees for the next 6 months. After that Ill be switching to a fee free bank)
Out of interest, do you know if the 41B they made in profit is solely from property? I work in asset management myself and RBC are a broker we'd deal with regularly. I'm just curious to see if that 41 figure is cumulative or if they are also killing it on the property side too?
Side note: Not excusing it for a second either. Here in Ireland we're in a similar situation, only two main banks and we're being completely shafted with the interest rates!!
Looks like, from their financial statements, that the sources of net income, from highest to lowest were: Personal and Commercial Banking, Wealth Management, Capital Markets, Insurance, Investor and Treasury Services and Corporate Support with the first one being the lion's share of their income. Im not sure where property would fit as it could touch on several of those areas.
41B was their gross income, 16B in net profit, from 17M customers so they made an average of $941 profit off each customer.
Looking at the 2022 annual report I see $49 billion (Canadian) in revenue and $15.8 billion in net income. Net income is broken down into segments, with "Personal & commercial banking" being $8.4 billion. So I get $600 on average.
Averages seem kind of irrelevant though, when you can look at your statements and know what you're paying? If you can find a better deal then go with them?
I would assume that 'customers' doesnt just include personal banking it includes ALL their customers who use their services. And I dont know how much profit theyre making off of me. I know how much my monthly fee is, but I also have money in savings accounts there. They currently pay me a measly 1.5% interest but you can bet that they are taking my money and investing it at considerably higher rates elsewhere - even lending it out to mortgage borrowers at 7% or making double digit interest in investment markets. The bank never loses
From a personal point of view, banking is a service you pay for and it makes sense to shop around. This is particularly true now that interest rates went up. If you're not making over 5% in interest, look elsewhere.
One option is to get a brokerage account and put your money into a money market fund. Using a brokerage account, you can also buy CD's from any bank, and some do have competitive rates, while still being FDIC insured.
(I don't know what options are available for Canadians, though.)
It's not true that banks always make money - they can lose enormous amounts, such as on bad loans. At the consumer level, they also have what are effectively loss-leaders or temporary discounts to attract new customers.
But as a customer picking a bank, it's not really your concern how much profit they make. Leave that to the investors to worry about.
Well, I would beg to differ. Especially when the most logical option is a credit union where I am the 'owner' as well as the user of the services. I have used one in the past and still have a cu account but haven't been using it much lately. During the years I was most active I had two mortgages and two accounts at the cu and at the end of the year, I got over $1000 back in profit sharing, so yes, it does matter who is making that money. It's my money. It may as well be me profiting.
(Ps. I know I could be making much more interest even in a savings bond, but at this point, easy, instant access is more important as I have other investments that are making much more than the bank will ever pay)
Interesting, thanks!
If you're going to be switching banks, I'd vote in favour of a credit union. As far as everything else goes... well I've been living with my parents. The only thing that I can do in protest of everything that's going on in the banking world is to stop spending money as much as possible, but even then - I've pretty much already zeroed out all of my spending and I support my parents with housework etc.
For what it's worth (not trying to debate anyone on this), any surplus money that comes my way generally gets invested into material assets and cryptocurrencies, as they're the only way that I can turn money into something that banks don't have control over. Even then, though, the fact that I have any surplus money in the first place is a blessing. What a world.
I agree with credit unions a lot. I actually already have an account and a mortgage at my local CU, however their online user interface is quite clunky and featureless, so Ive hesitated moving all my daily banking business to them. But after reading through the Royal Bank's financial statements just now I REALLY do need to get out of RBC.
Why isn't Canada building more houses? In the US some areas have the obvious answer of "NIMBYs".
Several reasons. a) lack of skilled tradesmen to do the work, b) very high building material costs, c) yes, NIMBYism where people dont want to have multi family housing in their single family suburbs, d) very high interest rates combined with even higher stress test qualifications. Eg. if the interest rate is at 7% you have to pass a stress test that shows you could still afford the mortgage at 9%, e) a gov. that has totally given up on social housing projects over the years and left it to the private sector and the private sector takes those low income housing units and upgrades them and sells them instead, f) a lack of political will because the power and the votes rest with the landowners not the renters.
Naomi Klein
The entire modern world is set up to take advantage of crises. Whole industries are working 24 hrs a day to take things away from us during disasters and conflicts. Thanks for giving us a place to catalog them.
That said, the Hamas/Israel war has pushed everything off the front pages, not just the shady and the scurrilous. Ukraine has had perhaps their best week of the entire 2023 counteroffensive around Avdiivka. Not much territory has changed hands but Russia has lost more men and aircraft in the last like 12 days than in any conflict since WWII.
It might (might) be the breakthrough the defenders need. The Kremlin is very happy to finally be out of the world’s spotlight for now.
Read Doppelganger after that. It's basically the sequel to Shock Doctrine. Written very recently so it's up to date with all the crazy ways the internet has affected the world.
The EU's working on the Cyber Resilience Act which will massively threaten open-source software development everywhere.
France just passed the SREN bill meant to force browsers to block a government provided list of websites.
Two things that have been on my mind lately.
We had a severe storm tide at the Baltic Sea shoreline in Denmark & Germany, the worst since over 100 years. The sea walls breached in some places. Beaches, piers etc are gone in many places. A friend sent me a picture from where she takes her morning walk with the dog - the entire way is gone and looks like a moon landscape + water now. First estimates are already in the 100 million €+ range. As far as I know this time there was ample warning, so apparently there was "just" one casualty (a woman was killed when a tree fell on her car).
Let's not forget that there's still a pandemic on.
Biobot recently had their contract terminated by the CDC. The new waster tracking system, really the only (previously?) reliable measure we have of COVID in the USA (too many sources here to cite but note how the CDC has changed its COVID reporting to make it increasingly difficult to compare past to prevent), was given to an Alphabet company. Said company provides negligible reporting on even the US' capitol compared to Biobot (1 distant suburb versus DC proper and several near suburbs respectively).
It seems like we're being given less useful information about COVID. Or, worse, this is deliberate; this conveniently occurs as there is an increase in pressure to RTO for all workers, particularly federal government workers.
It's hard not to see this as The Powers That Be want us to ignore the ongoing but not greatly decreased pandemic risk, just live life, and unconsciously accept that lifespans and quality of lives will be diminished for an indeterminate period of time.
Not sure how much I really want to get into this, but I guess I'll be that guy. To weird the language by verbing: aren't we past-tensing the pandemic now? We're closing in on four years since covid-19 was born, so now isn't it more of an "endemic"? I get how comparisons to influenza or anything else are lacking, covid is worse, but it seems to be like the danger is now down to an acceptable baseline where for most people we can finally put it in the background.
It feels weird to take this position because I don't want to be on the same side as the crazies from 2020 and 2021. But I don't think that "life has moved on" is a crazy position to take now.
I do agree that proper surveillance of covid, like with any other pathogen, is important.
I agree that the zeitgeist has definitely moved on, I don’t think the threat has changed considerably from this time last year. Most businesses have completely removed restrictions and even signage in my area.
But one place that I still see signs up (and freshly printed, not simply “haven’t been removed yet” posters) is medical facilities.
In 2019, my guess is the number of local doctors’ offices that had signs talking about wearing masks or using hand sanitiser was pretty close to zero (although there were plenty of signs talking about soap and water hand washing, they felt like general advice and not “please do this before entering the building” type signs).
But even my local GP clinic just last week still has heaps of signs up for hand sanitiser, “strongly encourages” (a step down from “mandatory”) masks, and explicitly says to call in advance (not show up) if you have any cold or flu symptoms.
I think I generally have more trust for the decisions of medical professionals than regular businesses when it comes to medical advice, even if they’re more on the paranoid side than I am. I take this as a sign that COVID is definitely still a threat to be considered.
So this doesn't really refute or support your point, but I get the impression that what's happening with medical facilities is that they can request/require these safety measures now. We've known for ages that masks help minimize spread, but (in the US at least) wearing a mask while sick just wasn't done until covid... Rolling in to a public space uncovered and sick was normal, and being asked to do otherwise would've been balked at. Now, it's part of the social consciousness that these are good and useful steps to take (ignoring the crazies for a moment, of course) so it's more acceptable to hold people to a higher standard of hygiene regardless of the illness.
"Just live life" seems to be an increasingly ineffective strategy these days.
Myanmar has been in a civil war since 2021. An estimated 40,000+ people have died (casualties on both sides).
The Tigray War 2020-2022, has claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (Estimates between 80,000 - 600,000+ dead) and displaced approximately 2.75 million.
Western media basically ignored both for whatever reason.
Learning about these two conflicts has completely disillusioned me to the idea that political attention is ever directed to conflicts because of humanitarian concerns, we only hear about problems if they're important to the larger geopolitical game that's being played.
Wow. That's pretty huge, thanks for sharing this. Totally on point with the political attention thing.