Canadian Personal Finance Blog

Why? well, for a lot of reasons, but the main one is due to the primary law of economics, which is if someone wants to buy it, the stock price is going to go up, and that is what is happening right now. Rumors of at least 4 possible “suitors” for BCE have driven the price of the stock up to levels not seen since 2000, and almost $10.00 higher than it’s 6 month low (of $28.00 Cdn). Why am I talking about this? Well, it is a stock, and I do talk about stocks occasionally (mostly to tell how lousy an investor I am), and it is a Canadian Icon as well.

So who is looking to buy this “Canadian Blue Chip” (note the quotation marks, that is what it is called, not what I call it)? KKR and three large pension funds are looking at BCE right now. This means that BCE could be like the Toronto Maple Leafs and other interesting companies, owned by a Pension Fund. It’s interesting that the big money in investing right now is coming out of the pockets of retirement funds. There is a lot of money there, but what happens when people start retiring?

• If the pension fund is successful in dealing with a huge number of baby boomers retiring and drawing on the fund, what happens to the excess money? Suddenly you have huge amounts of money looking to do things?
• If the pension fund is competent how does it deal with the money drain? Does it start selling things? Who is going to buy the assets being sold? Will this drive down the prices?
• If the pension fund mismanages, and implodes, what happens then? Yes, let’s not talk about that one too much, it’s depressing.

All interesting doom and gloom questions that we shall see play out over the next 10-15 years folks, stay tuned! –C8j

Sometimes Stats Canada has interesting side stories, which are still an interesting read, and Study: Science and engineering doctorates is an interesting read about PhD’s and Masters graduates and their “impact” on the economy. An interesting point that is made is:

Kingston and Ottawa–Hull proportionately had the highest concentration of science and engineering PhDs in Canada’s largest labour markets, followed by Saskatoon, Victoria and Sherbrooke.

Saskatoon? That’s another one that I’d want to know more about why? Is it because the population is smaller, or folks who have PhD’s like Saskatoon as a city? Interesting. Ottawa-Hull I could understand, just because of the Government drawing folks with higher educations and such.

The business of selling PhD’s (and that is effectively what the Universities are doing), must be booming. I remember the day when a bachelor’s degree was something to be proud of (as I am of mine), but now people keep asking why I didn’t get an MBA? Mostly because I don’t have the liver I did when I was younger (and I’ll leave it at that).

Will my kids need to have a PhD? I hope they get one, if they want one, but I am pretty sure I can’t afford it myself. Why is higher education so expensive? There is your home finance question for the day. The other one is, have you opened an RESP for your kids yet? Why not? How are they or you going to pay for their education?