CEO pay rose twice as fast as average Canadian + MORE Jan 2nd

(Stuart Dee/Getty Images)
OTTAWA – Canada’s top-paid CEOs saw their compensation climb at double the rate of the average Canadian between the depths of the recession and 2013, a new study has found.
The country’s 100 highest remunerated chief executive officers pulled down an average of $9.2 million in 2013, about 25 per cent more than the $7.35 million they amassed in 2008, said an analysis released Thursday by the left-leaning Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
By comparison, the average Canadian income in 2013 was $47,358, about 12 per cent more than the 2008 level.
“It’s a sort of a highly visible manifestation of growing income inequality in Canada,” said the study’s author, Hugh Mackenzie, who crunched the numbers on the CEOs of 240 publicly listed Canadian corporations on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
“I just don’t think it’s sustainable. I think that sooner or later public concern about income inequality is going to start to matter politically and something will have to happen…

(Adam Gault/Getty Images)
U.S. stocks delivered again in 2014.
Even after a poor start in January and wobbles in October and December, the U.S. market climbed 11.4 per cent and ended the year close to record levels. The solid gain pushed the bull run for stocks into its sixth year, the longest such streak since the 1990s.
Investors have been encouraged by rising corporate earnings and a strengthening U.S. economy, which helped stocks overcome a brief winter chill in growth and tensions with Russia. The stock market also overcame worries about the impact of the end of the Federal Reserve’s stimulus program.
Those who stuck out the market’s ups and downs were rewarded with double-digit returns for the fifth year out of the last six.
“Companies delivered and the ability to produce on the bottom line remained resilient,” said Jeff Kleintop, Charles Schwab’s chief global investment strategist. “Ultimately, that’s what stocks track.”
All the major stock averages are ending the year with respectable returns…

OTTAWA – Canadian exporters stung by Russia’s currency crisis and its retaliatory sanctions against the West wonder what 2015 will hold for a market filled with promise less than 12 months ago.
Companies from farm-equipment manufacturers to pork producers spent much of 2014 adjusting to the economic instability in Russia, a country that bought $563 million worth of Canada’s agricultural exports in 2012.
For some firms, the first half of 2014 had the hallmark of a banner year — and then sales evaporated.
A senior executive for one of Canada’s biggest exporters to Russia said his company did about $250 million in annual business there in recent years, mostly selling frozen pork products.
Olymel, a pork and poultry processor and distributor, appeared on track for its best year yet in Russia after more than two decades of working there, said Richard Davies, the company’s senior vice-president of sales and marketing.
But in August, Russia banned meat products and other goods from countries such as Canada in retaliation for financial sanctions by the Western countries…

Creative Commons/401(K) 2012
The new year has arrived, which means hangovers, doomed resolutions to lose weight, and a host of forecasts from the gurus in the financial media. I’m not sure which will cause more suffering.
The attention investors give to market forecasts remains one of the great mysteries of human psychology. The evidence is overwhelming that no one possesses the ability to consistently call the direction of the stock market, bond yields, or currency rates. Yet every year the media invites experts to do what we know they can’t do. And every year investors listen to them, act on their recommendations and suffer the consequences.
One reason this is allowed to go on is that forecasters are celebrated when they’re right but rarely held accountable for their bad calls. So last year I clipped several articles that included forecasts for 2014 so we could evaluate how accurate they turned out to be.
Let’s start with the Outlook 2014 by CIBC World Markets, which included the following forecasts for equities, bonds and currencies:

“US equities are hardly cheap given their run-up in 2013, but the Canadian market would appear to have more room to run … Within the equity market, what hasn’t played well in the past few years should now outperform…

This GIC rate is offered by Oaken Financial and was updated on 2014-12-19. Click on the link above to get more details or apply online.