I’m reading some interesting comments today:

Talking about Carney

Tom Mulcair writes Stop the handwringing. PM Carney is outmanoeuvering Trump on trade

Prime Minister Mark Carney has been consistent since he arrived on the scene: no deal is better than a bad deal.
But with an approaching deadline, Canada is fast becoming the hand-wringing capital of the world.
What if Trump won’t sign? What if we do and it’s not perfect?

Mulcair goes on to trace the connections between American booze, the premiers, the upcoming Newfoundland hydroelectric deal, upcoming byelections, protecting supply management in dairy, poultry and eggs. He concludes:

Carney has been wily in his approach to Trump, refusing to take the bait and sticking to his own game plan.
It’s tempting to answer Trump’s complaint about a trade deficit with Canada by offering to cut off oil exports to solve it.
Carney showed the depth of his experience and expertise when he recently said that being a reliable supplier is important. We have many exports and commodities, and our best commodity, arguably, is trust.
He added that he “didn’t see the value” in using energy as a bargaining chip.
That’s the mark of a thoughtful leader. It also contrasts sharply with the ill-informed bluster of the two New Yorkers, Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who have been blowing things up for 18 months.
But speaking of blowing things up, Trump is running out of ammo, and Iran is still keeping the Strait of Hormuz closed. Maybe, just maybe, showing that he can actually accomplish something positive with his closest ally and largest trading partner can help in Trump’s midterm elections.
The fact that the Gordie Howe bridge is finally open despite the lobbying of a Trump donor is proof that, however messy the process sometimes gets, Carney has the ability to get to ‘yes’, despite Trump’s worst instincts.
So let’s stop with the handwringing and realize that even with unbelievable pressure, Carney has so far been able to keep us on track.

I Fucking Love Australia writes King Carney Turns Canada into a Fucking Cash Cow There’s a bloke in Ottawa right now quietly running the single greatest economic masterclass on the planet, and the funniest part is that he kinda owes the lucky break to Donald Trump.

…Trump looked north and saw a doormat. What was actually there was a Rhodes Scholar with two central banks on his resume, a grudge politely filed under “leverage,” and a population that had just decided to stop stuffing around.
THE TALLY
Carney’s eighteen months: $183 billion in foreign investment, the best performing major stock market on Earth at 40 per cent up, inflation falling, most loved country in the world alongside Switzerland, biggest defence purchase in national history signed at over 50 per cent approval, new trade partnerships on every continent. Jesus Christ, why wasn’t my report card anywhere near that? Mine just said “easily distracted, talks in class.” His says “outperformed every economy on Earth, plays well with others, hands in his homework early, sharing skills excellent
Trump’s same eighteen months: tariffs functioning as confirmed taxes on his own voters, the California wine industry hemorrhaging, allied provinces boycotting American products, the largest military contract his neighbour ever offered handed to Germany, and the country he threatened to annex outperforming his own on every single metric that matters. Report card reads: “does not play well with others, bites classmates, set fire to the sandpit, blamed the sandpit.”
One bloke did the work. The other bloke is the reason the first bloke got the job.
Strewth. You’d almost feel sorry for him, if he wasn’t quids in on the whole disaster via whatever his mates were shorting that week….

And The Beaverton never disappoints:

Talking about Americans

Caroline Boudakian writes We Don’t Trust You Anymore And the felon’s signature won’t fix anything.

…August 19th will come and it will go. It changes nothing. Trump could sign the cleanest, fairest trade deal in the history of this relationship tomorrow morning and it still wouldn’t be worth the paper it’s printed on — because we already know exactly what his signature is worth. Absofuckinglutely nothing. We watched him do this to his own CUSMA deal, the one he called the greatest deal ever made in the history of deals.
There is no finish line here. Whatever happens on the 19th, millions of us are still not buying American on the 20th. Or in October. Or in 2027. Or in 2028. And beyond that, well, that depends on YOU, America. Our outrage doesn’t have an expiry date either.
Whatever, America, just STOP WHINING ABOUT IT!

They want nuance? Fuck nuance

Talking about Trump’s decoy plane stunt
Its still a big story, and for once the media haven’t just moved on already.

Talking about the coming crash(es)

Dean Blundell writes The “Big Short” Guy Who Called (And Cashed In On) The 2008 Housing Bubble Just Bet Against the AI Bubble While Betting on Financial Armageddon In The US Michael Burry looked at the most hyped trade in human history and said “nah.” You should probably pay attention.

Remember Michael Burry? Weird, brilliant, one-eyed doctor-turned-hedge-fund-guy? Christian Bale played him in The Big Short because he was the only person on Earth who read the actual mortgage documents in 2005 and realized the entire American housing market was a Jenga tower made of lies and strippers with five condos.
Everyone laughed at him. Then 2008 happened and he made a fortune while the rest of the planet lost their houses.
Well. He’s back. And this time he’s not betting against houses.
He’s betting against the robots. All of them, including OPEN AI and NVIDIA.
Yesterday, Burry disclosed that he ADDED to his short positions against the hottest names in the AI trade: Nebius (the AI cloud darling that’s up roughly 210% this year), Micron (memory chips), Oracle (Larry Ellison’s cloud money printer), and SOXX — the ETF that holds basically the entire semiconductor industry. He shorted Nebius at $247, Micron at $924, Oracle at $152, and loaded up on SOXX puts that run out to March 2027.
He’s shorting a stock that’s up 210% this year. That’s not a trade. That’s a religious conviction based on his fleecing of the housing markets in 2008.
…Burry’s core accusation is that the hyperscalers— Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon, Oracle — are juicing their earnings with an accounting trick so old it has grey hair: pretending their hardware lasts longer than it does.
They’re depreciating their Nvidia GPUs over five or six years. Except Nvidia releases a new chip generation every two-ish years that makes the old ones look like a Sega Genesis. If the gear is really toast in three years but you’re spreading the cost over six, congratulations — you just invented profits.
Burry calls it “one of the more common frauds of the modern era” and puts a number on it: roughly $176 BILLION in understated depreciation between 2026 and 2028. By his math, Oracle’s earnings could be overstated by nearly 27%. Meta’s by about 21%.
And underneath all of it? Circular money. Everybody’s buying chips from everybody, investing in everybody, and booking it all as growth — while hundreds of billions in data centre lease obligations sit off the balance sheet where the retail investor never looks. Burry called these companies “very fat, very large, easy to shoot” fish.
He watched this exact movie in 1999. Telecoms laid fibre optic cable like maniacs because the internet was The Future. The internet WAS the future. The telecoms still died — by 2002, less than 5% of that capacity was being used.
The tech was real. The money was fake. Both things were true. That’s the lesson everybody forgets….
…AI spending is basically THE American economy right now. Data centres, chips, power plants, construction — it’s the whole growth engine. Strip it out and the mighty US economy is a guy on a treadmill holding a Monster Energy.
If Burry’s right, the dominoes go like this: the depreciation reckoning hits, Big Tech earnings get marked down, the capex spigot slams shut, Nvidia’s revenue craters (a handful of hyperscalers are half its data centre business — Burry figures a 20% cut to Microsoft’s AI spending alone knocks 4% off Nvidia’s TOTAL revenue), the chip supply chain seizes, the construction and equipment guys (hi, Caterpillar) get smoked, and because AI stocks ARE the S&P 500 now, every index fund, every pension, every 401(k) — and yes, every Canadian’s RRSP stuffed with US index funds — takes the hit. Burry’s tally on the decade of inflated tech earnings? A $1.7 trillion “earnings illusion.”
Last time the market looked like this, the Nasdaq dropped 78% and took fifteen years to get its money back. And if that bubble bursts, I know who you should thank when youre walking out the door with a box full of your belongings to live in your truck. The guy who’s inflating that bubble while cashing in on that bubble using $432 billion of your tax dollars to do it in the month of July alone.
…Could he be wrong? Sure. He’s been early before, and in markets, early and wrong pay out exactly the same. He tweeted “Sell” in 2023 and the market ripped for two years — he ate that one publicly. The bulls will tell you AI demand is genuinely bottomless, old GPUs keep earning money running inference long after they’re obsolete for training, and Nvidia keeps beating earnings while Burry keeps adding to his shorts.
Maybe. Maybe this time really is different.
But “this time is different” is the most expensive sentence in the English language, and the last guy who bet against those four words while everyone called him crazy ended up played by Batman.

Andrew Coyne writes The United States is headed for a fiscal cliff

In the time it takes you to read this column, the United States will add another US$20-million to its national debt. By the end of the day, it will be nearly US$9-billion more than it was yesterday; in a week, US$60-billion, more than the government of Canada borrows in a year.
The annual U.S. federal budget deficit is now running at close to US$2-trillion: nearly 6 per cent of GDP, and headed for 9 per cent or more by 2036, assuming current tax and spending policies continue. The total national debt, at nearly US$40-trillion, now exceeds 120 per cent of GDP.
…Throw in state and local government debts of about US$3.7-trillion, and the net unfunded liabilities in their pension plans, at a measly US$700-billion, and you get something approaching the consolidated debt of the U.S. public sector: on the order of US$146-trillion, more than four times their GDP.
Of late, the people who buy U.S. debt have begun to notice. The yield on 30-year U.S. Treasuries, which fell through 40 years of disinflation after the early 1980s, has lately been rising. It now stands at more than 5.2 per cent, the highest it has been since 2004.
Some of that is real – all those government bonds competing for buyers with other bonds, from other issuers – and some of it is a premium for expected higher inflation, itself related to all that debt. At some point, market participants are betting, the U.S. may try to inflate its way out of its debts, paying back its lenders in devalued dollars. The interest rate they require to hold U.S. debt adjusts accordingly, to cover themselves against this risk.
Either way, it’s all kinds of trouble. The higher the interest rate on its debt, the more the U.S. government will have to pay its lenders, and the greater its debts will grow. Interest costs on U.S. government debt currently amount to about 3.3 per cent of GDP. They are projected to be nearly three times that much, relative to GDP, in 30 years.
But that assumes the average interest rate on U.S. debt, now at 3.4 per cent all maturities combined, rises only to 4.2 per cent. Were it to rise instead to, say, 5.2 per cent, the interest-to-GDP ratio rises to 15 per cent. At an average interest rate of 6.2 per cent – a rate more commensurate with the size of U.S. liabilities – it hits 22.4 per cent.
Even at 10 per cent of GDP – the “rosy” scenario – interest costs would be eating up more than half of all federal revenues. (For comparison, at the height of Canada’s debt woes, interest costs consumed 36 per cent of federal revenues.) At higher interest rates – well, it’s just too horrible to even contemplate.
The U.S. is heading straight for a fiscal cliff. And at its helm is a President who proposes to spend even more, and who demands the Federal Reserve, in the face of rising prices, cut interest rates. It is all going to end in an ocean of tears.

Oh look, the “fiscal conservatives” are running the government again.

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— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) August 13, 2026 at 9:29 AM

Speaking of upcoming crashes, I think the expected “super El Niño” will also qualify

Talking about the Blue Jays
Cathal Kelly writes The Blue Jays will make the playoffs, thanks to the ineptitude of the teams around them

…What’s changed is that they’ve stopped playing like the travelling recruitment department for a clown college, and the rest of the league has remained the same. It helps that, after a month-long burst of competence, the Red Sox are reverting to the mean.
The new, better Jays still have the 29th-ranked offence in baseball. Their pitching figures somewhere in the middle of the pack. Shockingly terrible plus mediocre should not equal one lucky weekend out of a playoff spot.
Vladimir Guerrero Jr. still looks like he’s trying to drive a nail with the wrong end of a shovel. Every day, someone different blows a connective joint getting up out of a chair. Now it’s up to Myles Straw to provide the heroics. Straw wasn’t an everyday player until the Jays ran out of outfielders. Just ran out of them. Like milk.
Every time anybody who isn’t Cease is pitching, you’re half expecting the other side to start driving balls through the outfield wall, not just over it. This team is hanging onto the bumper of every single inning it plays in.
You know what this means, right? The Jays are making the playoffs. Why? Because that is the most ridiculous thing that could happen.
They were five minutes from winning the World Series, and then they were the New Hampshire Fisher Cats, and now they’re going to be the team no one wants to play in the postseason because at least one of them is clearly a witch. They don’t how they will do this, but they will. It’s too perfect.
Again, in less unusual times, the gauntlet would be run in the next 10 days. The Jays face the Yankees, the Rays and then the Yankees again.
But this year, it won’t matter what happens, because the Texas Rangers’ charter will leave without the team and they’ll be swept while AWOL. Then the Seattle Mariners will try to change their luck by having every batter face away from the pitcher, and Cleveland will close their ballpark so that they can paint the seats a different colour.
If you need a reason to have faith, it’s not the Blue Jays. They’re still bad. Have faith that the rest of the American League is uninterested in being any better this year. Maybe it’s the coming work stoppage. Maybe it’s Dodgers fatigue. Whatever it is, no one wants to bother taking advantage of the most wide open year in living memory.
After that New York/Tampa/New York swing, the Jays’ season begins to angle downhill. And I mean, skiing off the edge of a cliff. Of the Jays’ last 10 series of the year, not one features an opponent with a winning record.
I don’t know what to tell you – keep your medium-term plans vague. You can already see the path through. The Jays take out the White Sox (charlatans) in the wild card. They rout Tampa (paper tiger) in the division series. They tear the heart out of the Yankees (can’t close) in the ALCS. And then it’s Shohei how you been since last year, we missed you guys.
It’s not me saying this. It’s you saying this. You’ve already said it to someone you know. You weren’t serious serious, but you were sort of serious. Now you’ve stopped saying it because you’re actually serious, and you don’t want to curse yourself.
But don’t worry. This isn’t that sort of curse. It’s the other kind.

I also want to share this great news – Blake Tierney from Saskatoon wins Gold in the men’s 100m backstroke! at the 2026 Pan Pacific Swimming Championships in Irvine California:

It’s his first international gold medal.

Blake Tierney breathes a sigh of relief and joy. It’s been a year of ups and downs for him.

To do this, on this stage, 100m backstroke gold at Pan Pacs, very special for Tierney.

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— Devin Heroux (@devinheroux.bsky.social) August 12, 2026 at 9:32 PM

Finally, tonight’s Wildfires Update