U.S. market pundit flees 'socialist' North
JOHN PARTRIDGE
Globe and Mail Update
September 19, 2007 at 3:28 PM EDT
The sky must be falling: Denis Gartman is beating a white-knuckle retreat from the Great White North.
The U.S. market commentator is abandoning his lengthy love affair with Canada and he's blaming Alberta's oil and gas Royalty Review Panel and the province's suddenly – wait for it –“socialist” government for his hasty exit.
“We have been relentlessly bullish of all things Canadian for a very, very long while,” Mr. Gartman declared Wednesday in a spectacularly hysterical, midday extra edition of his daily investor newsletter.
“The party seemed to us to only just be getting good, but the party ended last evening . . . when the [panel] issued a report calling for massive new taxes and massive new government intervention in the Canadian Golden Goose: Athabasca's Tar Sands.”
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Admitting he has not yet “read fully” the report, the bold commentator and trader nonetheless professed himself to be “shocked, aghast, disturbed, disappointed ... and we could go on” about the salient points he had gleaned from a Bank of Montreal commentary on the subject: to whit, that the new taxes to be imposed will take the province's royalty rate to 33 per cent from 25 per cent, and that oil sands developers could be the hardest hit, with the government's take from them rising to 64 per cent from 47 per cent.
“We ask the simple questions, “Are these people mad? Have they lost their minds? Do they really wish to kill this Golden Goose with one fell swing of the tax ax? Can Alberta's government really be that stupid?” opined the wounded sage, adding that the development also may well end the Canadian dollar's “long, bullish run” toward parity with the U.S. greenback.
“We fear, sadly, that this may be the first real return to the Left by a government we thought had been moving to the Right,” he said, adding elsewhere that Alberta has, in fact, “gone socialist on us again.”
In this light, Mr. Gartman continued, “We may be premature and we may be responding too swiftly [but] we want out of all things Canadian and we want so immediately.”
Ah, but the gallant commentator indicated he may bless Canada with his presence again down the road.
“We can return at a later date, or when these proposals are turned down by the legislature involved,” he said. “Until then, discretion is the far, far better part of valour.
“Goodbye Canada; it was fun while it lasted.”
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