IMF says China is managing transition to steadier and more sustainable economic growth + MORE Aug 14th

TORONTO – The Woodbridge Co. Ltd., the Thomson family’s holding company, has taken full ownership of The Globe and Mail after buying BCE Inc.’s (TSX:BCE) 15 per cent stake in the news organization.
Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The Globe and Mail was previously part of CTVglobemedia Inc., a combined company that included broadcaster CTV Inc.
BCE held a stake in CTVglobemedia until it was dismantled in 2010, when the telecommunications giant agreed to take full ownership of CTV.
At the time, BCE retained a 15 per cent stake in The Globe and Mail.
For years, BCE Inc. cross-pollinated content on its CTV broadcast channels with reports from the Globe and Mail newsroom.
On the Business News Network, which is owned by BCE Inc., some of the Globe’s business reporters regularly appeared to discuss their upcoming stories, while the Globe’s website would share select video clips from the BNN channel.
A subsidiary of the Globe and Mail holds an investment in The Canadian Press as part of a joint agreement with Torstar and the parent company of Montreal’s La Presse…

Conservative leader Stephen Harper holds a rally in Winnipeg on Thursday, August 13, 2015. (Sean Kilpatrick/CP)
When Stephen Harper promised this week that a re-elected Conservative government would boost the amount first-time home buyers can borrow from their RRSPs to cover the down payment, he touted the policy as a way to help Canadians achieve “financial security.” But paying for a house, while replenishing retirement savings, can also be a financial strain.
Harper pledged to let Canadians taking the home-buying plunge withdraw a maximum of $35,000 from their retirement savings, up from $25,000 now. Figures the Canada Revenue Agency provided to Maclean’s today showed half of those who took advantage of the federal Home Buyers Plan ended up failing to make the required annual repayments in 2013, which means they faced paying extra taxes as a result.
The plan has been around since 1992, and the Canadian Real Estate Association—a big backer of the program—says it has helped about 2…

The Canadian Real Estate Association says there were fewer housing resales nationally in July for the second consecutive month, but the number of transactions remained near the highest levels in several years and prices continued to climb.
Overall, CREA says most of the strength in sales in July was focused on Vancouver, Toronto and their surrounding markets.
Last month’s decline was largely because of a slight downturn in the Hamilton-Burlington and Durham region areas of southern Ontario after they hit record levels in June, the association said Friday.
Best Deals in Real Estate 2015: Overview »

Sales in Calgary were down from July 2014, but remained in line with long-term averages, it said.
The national average price for homes of all types sold in July was $437,699 — up 8.9 per cent from the same month last year — although CREA pointed out that the numbers were skewed by Vancouver, Toronto and surrounding areas, particularly B.C.’s Lower Mainland.
“These remain the only places in Canada where home prices are growing strongly,” CREA economist Gregory Klump said…

WASHINGTON – The International Monetary Fund says that so far, China is successfully managing a transition to slower but more stable growth.
In its annual checkup of the world’s second-biggest economy, the IMF predicted the Chinese economy will grow 6.8 per cent this year and 6.3 per cent in 2016, unchanged from earlier forecasts. China registered 7.4 per cent growth last year.
The IMF sees the deceleration as part of a deliberate government plan to wean China from overdependence on exports and often-wasteful investment in real estate and factories and toward slower, steadier growth built on consumer spending.
The fund again praised China’s decision this week to give market forces more influence in setting the value of its currency, the yuan. It also predicted that a recent sell-off in Chinese stocks won’t damage China’s economy.
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The title of Larry Swedroe’s latest book, The Incredible Shrinking Alpha, raises a question: what happened to the idea that skilled managers can consistently beat the market? In a recent interview with Swedroe, we discussed the idea that this ability hasn’t really disappeared: it’s just that “alpha has become beta.”
What exactly does that mean? In investing jargon, alpha is the name given to the excess return a fund manager achieves through skill. Beta, on the other hand, refers to the returns available to anyone who is willing to accept a known risk. When Swedroe says “alpha has become beta,” he simply means that anyone who understands how to structure a portfolio can increase their expected returns by simply changing their exposure to specific types of risk, known as “factors.”
A factor is a characteristic of a stock that affects its expected return and risk. Factor investing (sometimes marketed as “smart beta”) means identifying which of these characteristics might predict higher returns in the future—even if it also brings more risk—and then building a diversified portfolio that captures those returns in a systematic way, without resorting to picking individual stocks…