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Excerpts from Canadian Business
Rise of the cover-your-asset investor
by Dian Cohen
The subject is what middle-class Canadians are doing with their savings these days... I can say categorically that your average $40,000-a-year executive is running around like a chicken with his head cut off....
The guy with relatively limited means simply can't stand the volatility — he goes out and buys a stock and finds that next month it's down 30%....
That's why so many alternatives have developed simultaneously — commodity futures, gold, stock options, Oriental art, stamps....
What advice might [be offered] the $40,000-a-year professional for the 1980s? "Never retire: you can't afford to. Do so well at your job that you're indispensable. Then go out and look for another one. Or send your wife out to work if you haven't already."
—Vol. 53, No. 1, January 1980
Paul Martin takes the watch
by David Olive
Paul Martin is trying to be patient. Not three years have passed since he "put virtually every cent I had and could scare up" on the line with his purchase of a half interest in CSL Group Inc., Canada's largest privately held transportation firm. The $195-million leveraged buyout, arranged in partnership with Laurence Pathy, the Montreal shipping magnate, marked Martin's realization of a 15-year dream to own his own big company, and he knows he should sit back and savor the triumph.
But Paul Martin, 45, is also a passionate Liberal, and his reputation as a wildly successful businessman who also happens to possess a finely tuned social conscience makes him, in the eyes of many Liberal organizers, an ideal choice as their version of Brian Mulroney. As some 20 contenders jostle at the starting gate in the race to replace Pierre Trudeau as Liberal Leader [with John Turner the heir apparent], Martin's none-too-discreetly masked public-sector ambitions could get the better of him....
What kind of politician would Martin be? While he would uphold the universal welfare system his father helped put into place during the 1950s as health and welfare minister, he does not have as much faith in government intervention in the economy....
[Martin on] business people in politics: "As the side-effects of rapid technological change and the pressing need to integrate the world's economy come to the forefront as political issues, the need to draw business people into government will be reinforced."
—Vol. 57, No. 4, April 1984
The 1980s fostered monetarist Milton Friedman's ideas of economic management along with supply-side theories and US President Ronald Reagan's neo-conservative notions. Canadian novelist Katherine Govier, then living in Washington, wrote about those developments, and Canadian-born Harvard economist J.K. Galbraith offered a critique.
Pop prophet of the New Right
by Katherine Govier
Wealth and Poverty, the Bible of the new American right and the newcomer's guide to supply-side economics [is] already into its fifteenth printing with about 125,000 copies sold.... [Author] George Gilder is quoted everywhere from the New York Times to Business Week on the coming changes in social and fiscal policy that are leading Canada's southern neighbor further into laissez-faire capitalism--the sharp tax cuts, massive deregulation of industries, and withdrawal of grants, subsidies and much aid to the poor....
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