Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper & Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany -the More Things Change, the More They Stay the Same
November 2, 2006 -
On a continuation of the eventual possible $40 to $50 billion of destruction of wealth in the Canadian stock markets caused by the proposed taxation of royalty income trusts by the Canadian government, the bigger story is not that this happened, as many economists would intelligently argue that such tax loopholes should be closed, but the fact that Canadian PM Stephen Harper had deceived millions of Canadians during the last elections by promising not to do the very thing that he announced he would do yesterday – tax the trusts.
The sad thing, and what makes PM Harper’s lies of a much greater magnitude, is that many elderly Canadians voted for Harper based upon this promise. Based upon their faith in this man as being an honorable man who could be trusted, many put 100% of their savings in these income trusts. Read more …
Add comment November 2nd, 2006
I was thinking today that if only people were rational, then investing would be much easier. Maybe there truly is something to chaos theory, because everywhere you look people seem to act irrationally much more often than they act rationally. Case in point. Yesterday, the Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty announced that the Canadian government was most likely going to start taxing CanRoy income and raise dividend tax rates for pension funds and foreign investors four years from now, with immediate taxation applying only to newly formed CanRoys. However, yesterday investors sold off CanRoys like the plague, with many CanRoys suffering double digit losses even though these stocks will not be affected by this legislation until 2011! That’s like people rushing to liquidate their IRAs today because of an announcement that a new supplemental 10% tax will affect all IRA distributions 4 years from now. That’s irrational! 
