I agree Ben.
Sometimes people are just so damn busy in their everyday lives that they fail to see the standard of living is already dropping.
Everything has increased and will continue to do so, at a faster pace than we have ever seen in recent memory.
The missing link is wages which have fallen far behind and been forgotten about.
There was a time when we at least held our own, but that isn't happening anymore.
Everyday costs keep increasing,huge profits are being made in many sectors, but the worker is told there is no more money for wages to be had?
I think it is going to get a lot worse in the very near future as our economy continues to decline.

Im still waiting to make my decision on anything until the election is wrapped up..But what a great time to invest!! Ride the back of the bear market and be greatly rewarded.

Not necessarily so..The breakdown in the US economy was largely due to the sub prime mortgage problem - basically any one could get a house and as we all know that should not be the case. So when the real estate market started dropping house values dropped to a lower value than what the mortgage was for. The banks then said make up that difference or re-call the mortgage. This then had a snow ball effect given the high consumer debt and the debt of the country itself...had the bail out by the US government not have happened the whole market would have crashed - this by the way was not a real bail out - they simply printed more money.

This will have some effect on the Canadian economy but we will fair quite well compared to the US given the low debt and sound economic policies...

Ride the bear? ........All the way to the bottom?

If you believe we aren't gonna hurt from this, then I guess you bought the spin.

I would not call it losses in sales. We had an artificial increase in sales for 5+ years and an increase in AAC, and an increase in log hauling and in the number of shifts at mills and an increase in truck and rail shipping to the south.

Just as the mortgage lenders in the USA should have known that it had to end sometime, we should have known as well. Steady as she goes is what we need. A steady pace that is sustainable is much less stressful.

I might buy some real estate down there if I can find something interesting.

I wouldn't want to ride this bear. I think it's a grizzly.

Im not watching the standard of living in the states tank, im watching and capitalizing on the 3 billion people in the east that want our standard of living and will pay $$ for it..

Yes Ben I am with you. The bail out was merely a means of preventing a crash of the market.

lol johncameron...yup! A grumpy, hungry, nasty ENORMOUS grizzly!!!

Yeah I wouldn't touch the market at the moment, nor for some time to come. The bailouts merely cause the market to deflate slowly...it doesn't prevent the inevitable...the MASSIVE dodgy debt. So right now, what we are seeing imo, is investments being shuffled here, there & everywhere! Complete instability :0(

Canada will do much better.

For reflection I provide this link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzJmTCYmo9g

The derivative market needs to be crashed and killed and not allowed to return to haunt humanity in future generations. The bailout is to speculate a value with government tax dollars on paper of paper assets that have no real economic value outside of the financial casino that the bookkeepers will try to tell us are investment banks.

This current financial mess is not about bailing out sub-prime mortgages, but rather the investment tools that were spin off speculation devices wagering bets on some assets that included sub-prime mortgages.

This bail out is about the baby boomer generation financing their boom years through financial manipulation via deregulated derivative and hedge fund based wealth creation... and when the over leveraged margin is called on the bankers that facilitated the fake good times the next couple of generations are being called on to pick up the tab for an open ended financial slave commitment to bailing out bankers without any accountability or transparency as to how the Trillions of dollars of derivatives will be discounted as an appropriate value for something that will do nothing to help the real economy.

The banks are guaranteed to sell the worst assets (casino bets) to the tax payer at an inflated discount price and keep the best assets for their own profits. Thats is what this is about.

Capitalism and free markets are about being accountable for your financial wrongs. The so called 'investment banks' need to be left to die... and the market needs to find out what its true valuation levels are, so we can put the mess behind us and those that were responsible will be rewarded with the opportunities that made capitalism what it should be.

Prolonging the international financial cartel monopoly on manipulation by giving in to their blackmail and socializing their loses with public tax dollars will be the biggest mistake America ever made... even worse than the Iraq war by many magnitudes.

The reason the FBI is now involved is because all these investment banker casino derivative bets were private contracts between the bank and the other party... and so have absolutely zero regulation and oversight to see whether payout was appropriate are as part of criminal collusion.

These are the private financial contracts the tax payer is being asked to bail out. They say when the crime is to big its the governments problem. I think that is why we have local credit unions.