Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Debt Servicing Costs In 1995, Canada was teetering on the edge financially. For every dollar the government took in, it shelled out 35 cents to service the countries debt. Then under the austerity programs of both the Chrétien and Harper governments, Canada cleaned up its act. Debt service costs fell over 80%. Even with a covid pandemic and trade war forcing...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Cancelling Our Debt The far left has incredibly naive economic platforms. One that seems to be getting traction lately, is the belief that a countries financial problems can be solved by simply cancelling their debt. As one politician put it, make a big enough bonfire to burn all the countries IOU’s, and poof, the issues go away. What they don’t comprehend, i...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Don’t Get Mad - Get Even Consumers love the convenience of credit cards and all the bonus points that accumulate from using them. Every day, the big three in this space, Visa, Mastercard, and American Express, collectively process roughly 1.3 billion transactions totalling $72 billion dollars. This generates 1.4 billion in daily fees for the card companies. P...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Canada’s Healthcare Rankings The solution usually brought forward to solve Canada’s chronic healthcare problems is to simply spend more money. Yet compared to 32 other high-income countries with universal health-care, Canada is the second highest spender, but among the worst at delivering services. In 2024, Canada ranked second last for doctor availability, 2...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Election Fear Mongering Investors have always worried that the outcome of US mid-term elections could be bad for markets. Yet the S&P 500 has averaged double-digit gains going back to 1933 whether one party holds the House, Senate and presidency, or the House and Senate are each controlled by different parties, or even if the House and Senate are controlled b...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Why Is AI Tanking? Artificial intelligence is seeing the biggest infrastructure buildout in history. Until recently, investors just assumed, the spending that supports it would never end. Now that the fascination has worn off, they are starting to ask three important questions. Will the demand be there to support all these facilities? Will people be willing t...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Auto Makers Find New Opportunities The European and North American auto industries have been in turmoil for years. Environmental regulations, tariffs and higher borrowing costs are pushing new vehicle prices beyond the ability of much of the population to afford. Another problem is competition. The Chinese are flooding international markets with inexpensive v...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI Needs Guard Rails The US and China are in a battle to develop Artificial intelligence. The victors will achieve worldwide dominance in both defence and industrial development. The race has tightened to the point where Chinese AI models are estimated to be only 6 months behind the most powerful American ones. Even though AI has shown it can disobey human co...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Political Dreaming Political parties develop economic platforms that focus on easy promises voters like, but avoid the tough things they don’t. Take for example lowering taxes. The benefits are promised to produce an economic upswing that will create more wealth. The problem is that in the real world, tax reductions by themselves don’t work. They need to be a...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Private Equity Funds Private equity funds have seen huge growth. They buy companies that aren’t publicly traded with the rationale that these businesses are much cheaper than equivalent ones traded on the stock market. Their success has created a problem. With over 13,000 private equity funds now open for business in the US alone, there are too many funds for...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - A Cash Stash Futurists often talk about the day when societies will move past physical currencies, and all financial activity will be digitally or electronically based. For this reason, many people no longer carry cash, or for that matter, have an emergency stash they keep at home. This is a mistake. If the electricity doesn’t work, or our digital infrastruct...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Government Aren’t Good At Business Canada wants to build all kinds of infrastructure to make us less dependent on the US. The problem is that our projects seem to end up costing 2 to 5 times as much to complete as our foreign competitors. Whether we talk about pipelines, dams, electrical transmission or nuclear power … our cost over runs are third world. When...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Public vs Private Markets Publicly traded securities are priced at whatever buyers and sellers establish as their worth. Because situations can change rapidly in a free market economy, so do opinions and the prices investors are willing to pay. The negative side of being public is volatility. The positive is price transparency. Private equity owns assets that...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - What Are The Odds What brings gamblers into the stock market is the hope that they find the next Apple or Nvidia before it has a phenomenal price increase. They then plan to take a couple grand, hop on board, and let the ride make them a millionaire. Good on you if it works - but really….what are the odds of taking $2000 and putting it on a company that goes...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Lipstick on a Pig One of the great linguistic achievements of modern economics, has been its ability to take very alarming trends and wipe them from our collective memories by giving them nicer names. Debt became stimulus, government spending became investment, money printing became liquidity, bailouts became stabilization, intervention became support, inflat...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Plan B Mike Tyson described perfectly the problem people have dealing with adversity. He commented that “most of us have a plan until we get punched in the face.” Investors, will typically buy a stock or fund, because they see a lot of good things taking place that will push up the price. When this happens, the buyer knows what to do because they planned for...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Collector Car Trends Low supply and high demand drive the collector car market. What is hot right now, are vehicles that have V8 or V12 engines, especially if they come with a manual transmission. Low milage cars with both of these options get snatched up quickly and at a considerable premium. The reason, is that manufacturers just aren’t making vehicles with...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Debt & Interest Rates For every dollar of revenue the US government takes in, 19 cents of it, is needed to pay the interest on America’s 40 trillion dollar federal debt. The amount of money required to service this debt has doubled in the last 6 years, and could reach 30 cents on the dollar by 2035. What is most worrisome for investors, is that neither the De...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - AI Programming Software In spite of its well documented problems, artificial intelligence capabilities are advancing at an exponential rate. The length and complexity of tasks AI is able to complete, roughly doubles every 5-7 months. What’s amazing, is this growth is likely to progress even faster. In the past, human programmers developed software for each ne...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Consumer Stock Meltdown Companies that produce brand name products like Campbell Soup, General Mills and Nestle used to be places where conservative investors could go to find unexciting, but steady growth in sales, profits and dividends. These days - not so much. Over the last 5 years, many of these brands have seen their share prices fall by a third to half...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Alcohol’s Headwinds Beer and alcohol stocks used to attract conservative investors looking for companies generating steady growth. Over the last 5 years, this sector has been a disappointment. Sales and profits have headed in the wrong direction, taking stock prices along with them. And it doesn’t look like this trend will change. Younger customers are just n...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Canadian Energy’s Security of Location Canada is blessed with an abundance of energy. Globally we rank 4th in oil reserves and 9th in natural gas. Just as important - is our location. Buyers of Canada’s energy exports to Europe and East Asia, have direct access to them, via transportation routes across the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. The product does not hav...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Gold Bear Markets If you want to own physical gold, you have to learn to accept the volatility that comes with it. The metal has suffered 15 bear markets since 1971. Seven of those 15 “bear markets” lasted six months or less, with an average decline of 23% over 90 days. These numbers are close to the recent correction, which is down 20% over 6 months. By cont...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Central Banks & Gold Countries hold reserves in foreign currency to pay for their trade with other nations. Typically, the majority of these funds are denominated in US dollars. That has changed, as more nations reduce their greenback holdings and replace them with physical gold. The yellow metal is now the world’s second largest reserve asset - representing...

Making Money Minute with Ron Hiebert - Running Out The Clock Canada and Iran seem to have a common strategy. They are both passing on an immediate deal with the US that would be much to their disadvantage. By waiting, it pushes Trump closer and closer to the Mid-term elections on November 3rd, which he and the Republicans desperately need a victory in, to have any hope of completing their agenda....