That big bang you just heard wasn’t the garbage truck slamming your trashcans. It’s the marketing effort by a particular (recently-battered) industry targeting a particular community. It’s the realization of something big. And that’s where the money is.

You see, there’s an entire cottage industry — no, strike that (silly me.) There’s a whole lucrative multi-million dollar industry that’s been milking immigrants. It’s what I’ve started calling The Immigrant Market Industry (a full post on that later.) Most of this ‘market industry’ is busy churning out magazines, seminars, sessions, counselling, researches, academic studies, periodicals and acres and acres forests worth of paper. The more you produce, reproduce and recycle, the more government funding you get, apparently.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Tough economic times mean tightening belts. Governments are scaling back financial commitments and consumers are holding back unnecessary purchases. Even kids are having their allowances cut.

Of course, these are all boilerplate cliches. In real life, human nature compels us not to miss out on a great deal — something the marketing industry will continue to reap rewards with, and the advertising industry will happily tag along (I should know, I used to be an adman in my pre-Canadian career-gifted life.) But I digress.

As with most ill-informed laymen, I often mistake my familiarity with something to be knowledge.

However, unlike those poor ill-informed sods, I do have the honour and privilege of personally getting some of the most brilliant first-hand insights and informed opinion on these financial crisis.