Business

Last week we identified a “bargain” in Canadian real estate.

As you might recall, the Canadian economy is in a bit of a tailspin, and that goes double for the country’s dying oil patch. Indeed, we’ve documented Alberta’s painful experience with slumping crude exhaustively, noting that the steep decline in oil prices has triggered job losses (which hit their highest level in 34 years in 2015), depression, suicides, soaring food bank usage, and a marked uptick in property crime.

Submitted by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,

Even before his coronation in 1626, King Charles I of England was almost bankrupt.

His predecessors King James and Queen Elizabeth had run the royal treasury down to almost nothing.

Costly war and military folly had taken its toll. The crown had simply wasted far too much money, and brought in too little.

To make matters worse, King Charles was constantly at odds with parliament.

Another day, another Goldman prediction fiasco, and no, we are not talking about the stop out of the firm's Top Trade for 2016, namely the long USDJPY, short EURUSD (although that should happen any minute) - we are talking about that perpetual permabull, Jan Hatzius, just admitting the economy is in far worse shape than expected (if only by him), and as a result he just "revised" his Fed rate hike call, no longer expecting a March hike, instead now forecasting that the first rate hike will be in June and "and see a total of three rate increases this year."

Before we start, this tweet summed up most of the desk chatter todasy...

#WallStreet traders at their desks today :D @ForexStopHunter @livesquawk @ForexLive @zerohedge @Schuldensuehner pic.twitter.com/yrfmQTwTkW

— Jakub Stasik (@kubachybas) January 20, 2016

Services economy dismal, ADP data weak, crude fundamentals horrible... rip snorting ramp in crude and stocks...

We have previously shown just how bad the situation in the US heavy trucking space - trucks with a gross weight over 33K pounds - was most recently in "US Trucking Has Not Been This Bad Since The Financial Crisis" in which we looked at November data and found, that "Class 8 truck net orders at 16,475, were 59% below a year ago and the lowest level since September 2012.  This was the weakest November order activity since 2009 and was a major disappointment, coming in significantly below expectations.  All of the OEMs, except one, experienced unusually low orders for the mont