We Are More by Shane Koyczan

One of the highlights of the Vancouver 2010 Winter Games was the slam poetry reading by Shane Koyczan.  Here is there text of the poem.

When defining Canada

you might list some statistics

you might mention our tallest building

or biggest lake

you might shake a tree in the fall

and call a red leaf Canada

you might rattle off some celebrities

might mention Buffy Sainte-Marie

might even mention the fact that we’ve got a few

Barenaked Ladies

or that we made these crazy things

like zippers

electric cars

and washing machines

when defining Canada

it seems the world’s anthem has been

” been there done that”

and maybe that’s where we used to be at

it’s true

we’ve done and we’ve been

we’ve seen

all the great themes get swallowed up by the machine

and turned into theme parks

but when defining Canada

don’t forget to mention that we have set sparks

we are not just fishing stories

about the one that got away

we do more than sit around and say “eh?”

and yes

we are the home of the Rocket and the Great One

who inspired little number nines

and little number ninety-nines

but we’re more than just hockey and fishing lines

off of the rocky coast of the Maritimes

and some say what defines us

is something as simple as please and thank you

and as for you’re welcome

well we say that too

but we are more

than genteel or civilized

we are an idea in the process

of being realized

we are young

we are cultures strung together

then woven into a tapestry

and the design

is what makes us more

than the sum total of our history

we are an experiment going right for a change

with influences that range from a to zed

and yes we say zed instead of zee

we are the colours of Chinatown and the coffee of Little Italy

we dream so big that there are those

who would call our ambition an industry

because we are more than sticky maple syrup and clean snow

we do more than grow wheat and brew beer

we are vineyards of good year after good year

we reforest what we clear

because we believe in generations beyond our own

knowing now that so many of us

have grown past what used to be

we can stand here today

filled with all the hope people have

when they say things like “someday”

someday we’ll be great

someday we’ll be this

or that

someday we’ll be at a point

when someday was yesterday

and all of our aspirations will pay the way

for those who on that day

look towards tomorrow

and still they say someday

we will reach the goals we set

and we will get interest on our inspiration

because we are more than a nation of whale watchers and lumberjacks

more than backpacks and hiking trails

we are hammers and nails building bridges

towards those who are willing to walk across

we are the lost-and-found for all those who might find themselves at a loss

we are not the see-through gloss or glamour

of those who clamour for the failings of others

we are fathers brothers sisters and mothers

uncles and nephews aunts and nieces

we are cousins

we are found missing puzzle pieces

we are families with room at the table for newcomers

we are more than summers and winters

more than on and off seasons

we are the reasons people have for wanting to stay

because we are more than what we say or do

we live to get past what we go through

and learn who we are

we are students

students who study the studiousness of studying

so we know what as well as why

we don’t have all the answers

but we try

and the effort is what makes us more

we don’t all know what it is in life we’re looking for

so keep exploring

go far and wide

or go inside but go deep

go deep

as if James Cameron was filming a sequel to The Abyss

and suddenly there was this location scout

trying to figure some way out

to get inside you

because you’ve been through hell and high water

and you went deep

keep exploring

because we are more

than a laundry list of things to do and places to see

we are more than hills to ski

or countryside ponds to skate

we are the abandoned hesitation of all those who can’t wait

we are first-rate greasy-spoon diners and healthy-living cafes

a country that is all the ways you choose to live

a land that can give you variety

because we are choices

we are millions upon millions of voices shouting

” keep exploring… we are more”

we are the surprise the world has in store for you

it’s true

Canada is the “what” in “what’s new?”

so don’t say “been there done that”

unless you’ve sat on the sidewalk

while chalk artists draw still lifes

on the concrete of a kid in the street

beatboxing to Neil Young for fun

don’t say you’ve been there done that

unless you’ve been here doing it

let this country be your first-aid kit

for all the times you get sick of the same old same old

let us be the story told to your friends

and when that story ends

leave chapters for the next time you’ll come back

next time pack for all the things

you didn’t pack for the first time

but don’t let your luggage define your travels

each life unravels differently

and experiences are what make up

the colours of our tapestry

we are the true north

strong and free

and what’s more

is that we didn’t just say it

we made it be.

 

Game Theory and Morality

I am currently reading a book on game theory.  This quote in particular caught my attention:

[In game theory] acts are judged  by their consequences alone.  No moral value is placed on the act itself.

 

The puzzle of private equity | Buttonwood’s notebook | Economist.com

The puzzle of private equity | Buttonwood’s notebook | Economist.com

Shared via AddThis

 

The truth about grit – The Boston Globe

The truth about grit – The Boston Globe

Posted using ShareThis

 

Jill and Kevin’s Wedding Entrance

This is awesome – brings a tear of joy to my eye…

 

Thoughts on the Canadian Political Crisis – Stephen Harper You Need to Resign

Canadians are waking up to the mind boggling possibility that may be going into a worst recession in a generation led by a government comprised of politicians who either want to break-up the country or turn it into a socialist worker’s paradise and led by a prime minster who had not more than weeks ago vowed to resign because his party had gotten trounced in an election no more than 2 months earlier. What the hell is going on at home?

To paraphrase Chris Nolan, I can’t help wondering if Canada is getting the government it deserves as opposed to the one it truly needs. In looking at the possible outcomes, they all seem to be lose-lose.

 

Handicapping the Coalition Government

A coalition government would be inherently unstable and leave the country essentially run by a 3 person committee with a lightweight serving as a figurehead prime minister. I don’t believe it will enact the right economic policies to get through this current economic crisis and leave the country in worst shape.

Worse is the uncertainty of having the separatist Bloc in the government. Despite whatever public commitments to the contrary they may make, it is simply to risky to let the Bloc in a government where they would have every opportunity to undermine the unity and territorial integrity of Canada.

If Stephan Dion were a stronger leader, I might say this ‘team of rivals’ approach could possibly fly by having the separatists in government as a sort of ‘keep your enemies closer’ type of strategy. However as it stands, I don’t have confidence this will work – and the recent debacle of the whole ‘tape incident’ and subsequent back-biting amongst the 3 leaders has done nothing to instill confidence in this government.

 

Assessing Stephen Harper – Good Manager, Bad Politician?

On the other hand, Stephen Harper has not helped his case since breaking his promise and calling an early election in a gamble to secure a majority.  This gamble almost succeeded until an election gaffe related to Quebec funding for the arts.  This cost him votes in Quebec and ultimately the majority in Canada.

And while he has actually been a reasonable manager of the country and its economy he has not been a very good politician – his heavily partisan approach to parliamentary politics has only put off the very people he needs in order to maintain the good standing of his minority government.  Backing the opposition parties into a corner by removing the vote subsidy was final straw.  Rather than dividing his opponents in order support his rule he has rather remarkably united them. That two of the main leaders of this potential liberal-socialist-seperatist coalition (Dion the Federalist and Duceppe the Seperatist) in a previous life were mortal enemies who battled quite literally for the very future of Canada speaks volumes to the degree of animosity Harper has engendered.  They really hate the guy.

From his speech last night, Harper seems intent on fighting to very end, asking for a suspension of Parliament (to avoid a no-confidence vote) and taking his arguments straight to the voters.  Unhelpfully, he has played up the divisive issues of the Separtists in Government and raised the spectre of protests and demonstrations in the street.  Should Harper decide to  go to war on this front, I can only think Canada is going to emerge from this episode with its unity severely frayed.  It would be interesting to see how voters will eventually react to this episode, which parties will be eventually punished at the polls, but in the end the whole country ends up a loser.

 

The Government Canada Needs?

A reasoned approach then would be to have Mr Harper step down for the sake of his country.  This could be positioned to signal to the opposition the end of the Conservative scorched earth partisanship and remove, argueably, the biggest animus for the opposition revolt.  Conservatives could hopefully then get back to the task of fixing the economy.   Economic stimulus, infrastructure building, streamlining regulations which keep the cost of doing business high, diversifying the economy beyond natural resource extraction and not frittering away money in auto bailouts – but instead acting judiciously after seeing what US government does.

This strategy is not without risks and probably a little too far removed from reality.  It assumes that the Conservatives would be able to find a suitable replacement leader which, given the outsized role Harper played in the current Conversative government, may be a cause for concern.  Peter Mackay, the former leader of the PC’s which eventually merged with the Canadian Alliance to form the current Conservative Party might be a viable alternative – but that’s mere speculation on the top of a hypothetical scenario.

Regardless of what happens, here’s hoping the politicians come to their senses and pull back from the brink of this political crisis so they can get to work helping the country pull back from the brink of this current economic one.

 

Thank You America

Dear America,

Thank you for making history.

Thank you for finally turning the page on the last 8 years.

The next 4 years will not be easy but thank you for taking a major step in the right direction to repair the damage of the last 8 years that arguable should never have been.   It has been a long night these past 8 years but tonight we take a step back into the light.

Dear America, thank you for restoring the world’s faith in you.

Sincerely, 

Alvin

 

Obama taps Wassup!

Remember the old Wassup commericals that Bud use to run?  I remember the watching and imitating that dumb (but highly entertaining and memorable) commercial as we pulling crazy all nighters on out dot-com startup – yes THAT long ago, but good times.  (A shout out of the old crew – Jag, Paul, Tim, Urbo and Jeff!)

Fast forward to 2008 election-eve and looks like some brilliant Obamaniac resurrected that it to remind us how far (down) we come from those good times. 

Check it out:

Hats off to team that put this gem together.  Well done.

 

Thoughts (original and otherwise) on the Banking Crisis

So yet another week passes and we see ourselves in deeper and deeper into this, as yet named, financial crisis (somehow “Sub-Prime” just doesn’t seem adequate anymore, the generic ‘2007-08 Banking Crisis’ will probably be what we settle on.)

And this topic has certainly been on the minds of many of my fellow classmates (primarily because of recruiting) and faculty members (primarily the value of their 401k’s I guess) here at school.  In fact, our school felt it necessary to host no less than separate 2 discussions on the crisis on consecutive days to given everyone a forum to discuss and share their views and opinions.

To you, the inquisitive reader, I thought I would take a couple of minutes to jot down some of the jumble of thoughts on the banking crisis:

“What is the root cause of the banking crisis?”  A broad and vague question posed to me by my social enterprise professor on the 2nd day of class – prolly more to seek out answers he could reuse by polling the collective intelligence of the class for answers – rather than as part of his lesson plan.

• My first response was: “Relaxed borrowing standards for home mortgages to the point that any fool and his dog could take out a loan.”  If you inherently believe in  having free markets that are efficient and will allocate resources to areas that maximize economic return of the participants than this has to be your starting point.  I’m not going to blame the banks for their securitization and structuring activities – this made money and therefore was worth doing, this was the invisible hand at work.  Which brings me a corollary:
• If it’s legal and it makes money (and yes securitizing and repackaging home loans made a boatload of money for them), the investment banks will do it.  The nature and structure of investment banking remuneration (i.e.  focus on big year-end bonuses) rewards bankers for taking risks that pay off in the short-run, long-run risks be damned.  This creates a culture which increases systemic volatility as all the bankers race to get a share of their slice of the pie (in whatever is the latest reward of scene of the day) before the party ends.
• Profit-driven Debt rating agencies which had massive conflict of interests that corrupted their ability to fairly rate debt and that assigned investment grade ratings to the eventually toxic mortgage-backed securities and CDO’s.
• The regulatory environment was all of:
  • too outdated (current structure of financial regulation has not been updated since the 1930’s)
  • too slow or cumbersome (perhaps the US’ rules-based regulatory framework should be sunset in favor of the UK’s principles-first regulatory framework to financial innovation can be automatically matched instead of waiting for lawyers to update the books)
  • too weakened by successive cuts in the funding of the regulatory agencies

to be able to respond.

What about the issues of low historic yields distorting the markets? I heard this sentiment several times and I agree that this definitely contributed to our problems but I don’t agree its the root cause.  As the Fed (re Alan Greenspan) kept rates artificially low for too long (remember Greenspan’s argument that productivity gains from info tech would allow for lower rates of natural unemployment?) this distorted the capital markets.

Related to  Alan Greenspan’s low-rate management policy of the overnight Fed Funds rate were the lessons learned from the Asian Financial Crisis of 1997-98 which instilled a “best practice” of running current account surplus, stockpiling foreign currency reserves and maintaining weaker currency in order to stave off a repeat of ’97-’98.  Of course this had the unintended consequence of flattening out the rest of the US debt market’s yield curve as Asian countries furiously bought treasuries to park their current account surplus and keep their currency relative weaker.

Asset managers, with their trillions of dollars, could no longer rely on a decent real interest rate from the bond markets to earn a reasonable return for their income-seeking fundholders eventually turned to more risky ‘alternative investments’ fueling a boom in hedge funds and private equity.

(These hedge funds with their “2 and 20” payout structure likely contributed additional volatility in the capital markets by fostering a ‘go-big or go-home’ mentality as these fund managers sought outsize risks in order to make outsize gains for their 20% carry.)

Where do we go from here?

I guess this is where things get interesting.  A lot of folks talked about the notion of ‘delevering’ or essentially borrowing less.

For example – now that Goldman and Morgan are commercial banks, they are going to have to run their operations and balance sheets like them.  Whereas they are currently levered 40 and 33 to 1 respectively, they will now have to come in-line with the rest of the commercial banks at 10.   Which means selling off 66% to 75% of their assets (i.e. loans to their customers).  This does imply that GS and MS are now likely to be less profitable and less valuable as they can only lend (and collect interest income) on 1/4 to 1/3 what they could previously have done?

Broader implications to the US economy is that money supply will be tighter, less money flowing around as regulations will (hopefully?) rein in irresponsible lending.

In the medium run, low-yield market distortion could see itself worked out as foreign investors – re Japan and China switch their target instrument of treasuries into alternate and equity investments and out of US dollars into more diversified basket of currencies – this latter treend is already happening and will likely continue.  This will of course have implications on the alternative investments financial management industry.

Longer-term, of course, there is another looming issue which seems to have submerged back from mass consciousness – that of the twin deficits (budget deficit and current account deficit) triggering US-confidence crisis which result in spiking interest rates and falling US dollar (I guess that is already happening) as foreign investors turn their back on US economy.  The potential saving grace here is that given the risk adversity of these investors and the unsettled state of the world and other economies, the US still represents the safest destination for investors…for now.

 

What’s the Matter with Canada? Thinking about the coming Canadian election

Here’s an intriguing outside-in article decrying the decline of “good government” in Canada from Slate.com and got me thinking about the upcoming Canadian election.

Yes, amazingly a US-media outlet deemed it necessary to comment on the rather fractitous state of Canadian politics especially when they have this oxygen draining Presidential poll still going down Nov 4.  Here’s the best (and most sensationalistic line from the article)

Canada is quietly becoming a political basket case, and this latest election may make things even worse.

The essential thesis is that Stephen Harper and his social conservatives are ruining Canada and that the Liberals, NDP, Greens and everyone else on “the left” helping them to it be being too pre-occupied fighting each other.

Well my folks will probably take issue with the whole ‘Harper is ruining Canada’ thesis – they always had a hate-on for the Liberals – but that was always more grounded in the Liberals’ arrogance, abuse of power and lack of fiscal restraint that came from Liberals’s prolonged bouts in power.  Even the Democratic party in the US suffered from this type malaise leading up to Newt Gingrinch’s Republican Revolution in the 90’s but I digress.

From its social liberalism and fiscal conservatism, Canada has traditionally bounced back and forth between the socially and fiscally liberal Liberals and fiscally and socially conservative Conservatives. 

The Conservatives are betting the snap election will yield them at minimum another minority government and majority as being a not-so-improbably possibility if they play their cards right.

Thus far, I think the minority government has done a relatively good job of keeping social-conservatism of the Conservatives in check.  No where did the Conservatives try for a repealing abortion rights or gutting Canadian health care.  And I give points to the Conservatives for:

• not spending Canada’s new wealth from the current commodities boom like drunken sailors
• paying down the national debt
• defending Canada’s sovereignty in the Arctic
• and holding the line in Afghanistan – the real front on the war on terror – while the US went on their adventurist diversion in Iraq.

From afar, though it has been more fractious and turned Canada into a more interesting country, I’m not yet convinced a Conservative majority would be in the best interests of Canada – or for now the Conservatives for that matter. 

The problem is that Canadian’s don’t fully trust the Conservatives to leave them to their own devices.  As evidenced by their website, The Conservatives have sensibly decided to run on tactical issues of sound economic policy, tackling crime and important incremental improvements in better government operation in healthcare (and lip service to global warming.)  I think what is spooking the majority of Canadians is what the Conservatives are not saying and what they would do if granted the unfettered power of a majority government.  Where exactly do they stand on abortion and same-sex rights?  Healthcare funding?  What about the devolution of power to the provinces?  What exactly is the Conservative vision for the future of Canada?  What the Canadians don’t know scares them. 

And here’s the rub – the Conservatives don’t need a majority government to achieve their incremental gains they are proposing to accomplish following this election.   In order to get a mandate of a majority government you have specify what IS the mandate you are looking for.  The Conservatives would be better off doing some soul searching and specifying what a Conservative Canada would and would not look like to give voters some comfort in exactly what they are getting.  This also precludes them of being in the rather interesting position should the ever secure a majority, of leaving them open to the temptation to give into their more base socially conservative instincts.

To sum up, until they can elaborate what exactly they stand for, the Conservatives deserve every minority government they get and are cheating Canadians of any majority government they may eke out.  Here’s to another year of gridlock in Canada?