Business
Canadian home sales see a record December — and a record 2020 – CBC.ca
National home sales set an all-time record in December, the Canadian Real Estate Association reported Friday.
Sales were up 47.2 per cent compared to December 2019, the largest year-over-year increase in monthly sales in 11 years.
The spike in sales from November to December, 7.2 per cent, was driven by gains of more than 20 per cent in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) and Greater Vancouver.
It was a new record for the month of December by a margin of more than 12,000 transactions.
For the sixth straight month, sales activity was up in almost all Canadian housing markets compared to the same month in 2019.
It was also a record for the entire year.
Average home price up 17%
Almost 552,000 homes traded hands over Canadian MLS systems — a new annual record. It was an increase of 12.6 per cent from 2019 and 2.3 per cent more than the previous record year, 2016.
The actual national average home price was a record $607,280 in December, up 17.1 per cent from the final month of 2019.
The CREA said that excluding Greater Vancouver and the Greater Toronto Area, two of the most active and expensive markets, lowers the national average price by almost $130,000.
Many of the areas with the biggest price gains last month were in Ontario, including Belleville, Simcoe, Ingersoll, Woodstock and the Lakelands region, where prices were up more than 30 per cent from December 2019.
Areas with more modest price growth included Calgary and Edmonton, where prices rose 1.5 per cent and 2.7 per cent, respectively.
TD expects sales and prices to cool
“What a fitting end to a surprisingly strong year,” TD Bank economist Rishi Sondhi said in a note to clients. “Relative strength in high-wage employment, record low mortgage rates, rising supply of homes available for purchase and solid demand for larger units all supported exceptional sales and price growth last year.
“Looking ahead, we’re expecting sales and prices to cool somewhat from their robust pace in the first quarter. However, December’s surprisingly strong performance makes hitting our forecast a tougher proposition.”
Shaun Cathcart, CREA’s senior economist, said in a statement that Canada faces a “major supply problem” in 2021.
“On New Year’s Day there were fewer than 100,000 residential listings on all Canadian MLS systems, the lowest ever based on records going back three decades,” he said.
“Compare that to five years ago, when there was a quarter of a million listings available for sale. So we have record-high demand and record-low supply to start the year. How that plays out in the sales and price data will depend on how many homes become available to buy in the months ahead.”
Business
Unplanned shutdown of Imperial pipeline will affect delivery of fuel to Winnipeg for months – The Globe and Mail
Imperial Oil Ltd. has shut down a key pipeline that supplies the Winnipeg area with gasoline, diesel and jet fuel, as the Calgary-based company scrambles to make repairs and find ways to continue transporting fuel to the city by truck and train.
Routine inspections by Imperial IMO-T earlier this year found what the provincial government calls “integrity concerns” in a section of the Winnipeg Products Pipeline under the Red River near St. Adolphe, a community about 30 kilometres south of Manitoba’s capital. The line was shut down on Sunday as a result – an unplanned move that the company says is “preventative maintenance to ensure the integrity of the line.”
Imperial would not provide details about what the inspections uncovered that required the repairs.
The City of Winnipeg’s chief administrative officer, Michael Jack, initially contended that the problem is far worse than Imperial has said but changed his opinion on Monday.
“Candidly, I don’t believe this PR statement accurately conveys the gravity of the situation; we have reason to believe the supply of gasoline products to the entire city (and beyond) may be compromised for a period of time,” he wrote to city councillors on Sunday, in an e-mail obtained by The Globe and Mail.
At a press conference on Monday, Mr. Jack told reporters he is “feeling good” after conversations with Imperial. “We are paid to worry about these things. We don’t send a lot of e-mails saying everything is fine,” he said.
“A discussion around gas can cause people to get anxious, and we just simply don’t have any reasons to think anybody should.”
Later on Monday, Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew said while there is no reason for the public to panic or for people to stock up on fuel, the government is looking at obtaining backup supplies in case Imperial falls short.
Mr. Kinew said he has also been in contact with North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum to enquire about equipment, logistical expertise and any fuel supplies that the province can turn to the state to help with. More than 50,000 train cars carrying fuel as well as fuel trucks are on their way to Winnipeg as of this week, he said.
“We have a week or two worth of fuel supply in the city right now. Our hope is that that backup supply will be in place ahead of that two-week period,” the Premier said.
The pipeline carries refined petroleum products to Winnipeg from the Enbridge Mainline pipeline at Gretna, Man., on the Canada-U.S. border.
Imperial said in a statement Sunday night that it is arranging alternate forms of transport to keep fuel moving into Winnipeg and surrounding communities. The company is also identifying other terminal locations where customers can pick up products, including at Enbridge’s Gretna crude oil tank terminal, which remains connected to pipeline supply from Western Canada. The terminal has a capacity of about 335,000 barrels.
Gasoline supply will be managed with additional storage and loading capacity at the Gretna terminal, using rail and trucks to transport the fuel to Imperial’s Winnipeg terminal, and arranging for customers to use other supply points outside of the region where possible.
Diesel supply will be managed by rail, and jet fuel by truck.
Imperial said in an e-mail Monday that it expects the line will be out of service for three months, but the company is working to expedite work where possible.
The provincial government and Imperial say nothing has been spilled into the environment from the pipeline.
However, the pipeline shutdown comes at a time of increased scrutiny of Imperial. It came under fire early last year for failing to tell local Indigenous communities about months of leaking from tailings at its Kearl oil sands facility in Northern Alberta into the environment. There have also been two spills at the site in the past year.
The oil pipeline shutdown also comes just weeks after two City of Winnipeg sewage pipelines burst under the Red River. Hundreds of millions of litres of raw sewage had spilled into the river for days, a situation the city attributed to aging infrastructure.
Mr. Kinew said the province is not yet sure whether the Imperial shutdown relates to Winnipeg’s old infrastructure. He is leaning on the company to do the right thing, but “with a healthy dose of skepticism,” he said.
“Through the initial stages of this response, we have seen that there is probably a need for more regulation and legislation in this space,” he said.
Business
USD/JPY moving around, swings helped by thinning liquidity ahead of Bank of Japan decision – ForexLive
Business
Tech giant Nvidia unveils higher performing ‘superchips’ to power AI – Al Jazeera English
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang tells developers conference that computing is advancing at an ‘insane’ rate.
Nvidia has unveiled its latest family of chips for powering artificial intelligence as it seeks to consolidate its position as the major supplier to the AI frenzy.
“We need bigger GPUs. So, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to introduce you to a very, very big GPU,” CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday at a developers conference in California, referring to the graphics processors that are vital in the creation of generative AI.
The event, dubbed the “AI Woodstock” by Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, has become a can’t-miss date on big tech’s calendar due to Nvidia’s singular role in the AI revolution that has taken the world by storm since the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022.
“I hope you realise this is not a concert, this is a developers’ conference,” Huang joked as he took the stage in a packed arena usually reserved for ice hockey games and concerts.
Nvidia’s powerful GPU chips and software are an integral ingredient in the creation of generative AI, with rivals like AMD or Intel still struggling to match the power and efficiency of the company’s blockbuster H100 product, launched in 2022.
Apple, Microsoft and Amazon have also developed chips with AI in mind but for now are stuck trying to get their hands on Nvidia’s coveted products to deliver on their own AI promises.
That linchpin role in the AI revolution has seen Nvidia’s share price rise by roughly 250 percent over the last 12 months, propelling the company above Amazon when measured by market capitalisation, behind only Microsoft and Apple.
Not letting up, Nvidia told the audience of developers and tech executives it was releasing an even more powerful processor and accompanying software, on a platform called Blackwell – named after David Blackwell, the first Black academic inducted into the National Academy of Science.
Blackwell GPUs were AI “superchips” four times as fast as the previous generation when training AI models, Nvidia said.
“The rate at which computing is advancing is insane,” Huang said.
They would also deliver 25 times the energy efficiency, Nvidia said, a key claim when the creation of AI is criticised for its ravenous needs for energy and natural resources when compared with more conventional computing.
Unlike its rivals Intel, Micron and Texas Instruments, Nvidia, like AMD, does not manufacture its own chips, but uses subcontractors, mainly the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co.
Given the geopolitical concerns with Taiwan and China, this could be a potential weak spot, and the US has banned Nvidia from sending its most powerful chips to Chinese companies.
Nvidia also announced other AI developments, including a platform for training humanoid robots.
Project Gr00t, which Nvidia said was not named after the Guardians of the Galaxy movie character Groot, was described as the “world’s first human foundation model”.
Gr00t-powered robots will be designed to understand what people say and mimic people’s movements, learning from experience how to interact with the world, according to Nvidia.
The models “will enable a robot to learn from a handful of human demonstrations so it can help with everyday tasks and emulate human movement just by observing us”, Nvidia said.
Nvidia said it was also working with Apple to put AI capabilities into the newly-released Vision Pro spatial computing gear.
The collaboration comes as Apple is under pressure to show it is not being left behind by Amazon, Google, Meta and OpenAI when it comes to artificial intelligence.
Nvidia also unveiled the Earth-2 Cloud Platform for predicting climate change, using simulation by AI supercomputers.
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