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local sales of existing homes listed on the Multiple Listing Service are anticipated to fall to an estimated 13,750 units from 14,923 in 2010, a 7.9-per-cent drop, before picking up again to approximately 14,100 units in 2012.

Higher anticipated mortgage rates have resulted in a pull-forward effect on housing demand

sales were higher in late 2010 and early 2011 as buyers rushed to avoid rising interest rates and new mortgage rule changes

But as the U.S. continues to pare back its oil consumption, other economies will seek a bigger share of the pie from a near static world oil supply. With power shortages spreading in China and Japan, as well as India and Pakistan, demand for diesel fuel is soaring in power-starved Asia.

With little, if any usable excess capacity in OPEC, world crude demand is already on the verge of outpacing world supply. In the resulting zero sum world, conflicting trends in oil consumption between the world’s two largest oil consumers, the U.S. and China, will not be the exception but the norm.

If the Chinese economy is going to continue to increase its oil consumption by 10 per cent a year, another economy will have to cut back its oil consumption by a comparable amount to make room for the increase in Chinese demand. More and more, that place looks like America.

House prices in Canada will fall over the next several years by as much as 25 per cent, creating a massive impact on the economy and possibly pushing the country into recession, says a forecast

predicting house prices will fall by a cumulative 25 per cent over the next several years

 Madani says the effects on consumer spending and housing investment could be significant and perhaps strong enough to “push the economy into another recession

a proposal Tuesday that would increase the nation’s ability to borrow money without also making major cuts in federal spending

initial request that the nation’s $14.3 trillion debt ceiling be lifted without any accompanying spending reductions

politically impossible.

Canada would benefit just as much from the creation of a national electricity grid as it did from the development of the railway and the pipeline. As a nation-building effort, developing these grid connections would give provinces options to buy and sell power of all stripes. Unlike crude oil, it is a consumer product that can be used everywhere, and Canadian supplies of electricity are increasingly renewable in form. Such a project would increase the renewable power potential for Alberta and Saskatchewan by linking existing and future hydro development in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba and British Columbia to these markets. While the distances here are excessive, the challenge is not insurmountable.

Many Canadians may not realize this, but most of Canada’s long-distance, high-capacity connections for oil and electricity run north-south, not east-west. In these key industries, we have focused almost exclusively on serving the U.S. This is one of the great strengths of our nation -- the ability of each province to create its own best strategy for developing revenue streams. It’s also a weakness, because lack of access to other provincial markets has effectively siloed our energy strategies along provincial lines, leading to a patchwork of development across the country that does not take advantage of potential synergies across regions.

Japan may face a shortage of green tea as radiation leaking from the crippled Fukushima Dai-Ichi power station tainted leaves, spurring the government to restrict shipments from four prefectures.

The government decided yesterday to curb shipments of dried tea leaves containing more than 500 becquerel per kilogram of radioactive cesium and ordered a halt in shipments from the eastern prefectures of Ibaraki, Chiba, Kanagawa and Tochigi where tainted produce was detected. Japan’s tea production, including fresh and dried leaves, was worth 102.1 billion yen ($1.3 billion) in 2009, according to the agriculture ministry.

The decision came after Shizuoka prefecture, Japan’s largest growing region representing about 40 percent of total output, declared its green tea was safe. Governor Heita Kawakatsu said last month tests on fresh leaves and drinks showed they contained cesium amounts well below the government levels. Still, cesium levels in dried leaves could be about five times higher than fresh leaves, said Yasuo Sasaki, senior press counselor at the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries.

Instead of soaring food and energy prices encouraging food and energy producers to export more, they may export less and divert more of their output to domestic markets. The reason is simple: to keep domestic prices from matching soaring world prices.

But when it is food and energy prices, the political pressures become immense. They are so immense you can toss your economics textbook out the window.

Instead, no less than 29 food-exporting countries responded by banning food exports and kept their crop production for a hungry domestic market.