The New Home Price Index chart paints a clear picture: the Canadian real estate market seems stuck in a bearish cycle. As of December 2024, the latest data indicates a continuation of this downward trend, suggesting a sustained period of weaker demand and lower home prices. This trend is typical of a bear[...]

Canada's Perfect Storm: High Debt Service Ratios Meet Political Risk The latest Bank for International Settlements (BIS) data release for H2 2024 shows a concerning pattern for Canada's private sector Debt Service Ratio (DSR). At 24.9%, Canada's DSR towers above other developed economies, painting a picture of an economy increasingly vulnerable to financial and political[...]

Canada's Household Debt: The End of the Credit Era? The story of Canadian household debt over the past five decades reads like a cautionary tale. Recent data from Statistics Canada and the Bank of Canada paints a stark picture: Canadian households have embarked on a borrowing spree that has taken total household credit from a[...]

  Understanding the Economic Seasons: A Look at the Kondratieff Wave The Kondratieff wave, named after the Russian economist Nikolai Kondratiev who first proposed the theory in the 1920s, offers a fascinating lens through which to view economic cycles. According to this theory, the global economy experiences long-term cycles of boom and bust, spanning several[...]

Think of great investors as better at reading the odds, but with an important twist: they also understand that what you pay for changes those odds dramatically. It's like the lottery example but now consider the ticket price. If a lottery ticket costs $1, and you have a decent chance of winning $100, that might[...]

In February 1989, Toronto's real estate market was at the peak of a housing bubble. The high five-year fixed mortgage rate of 12.25% at the time reflects a general environment of high interest rates used to curb inflation throughout the late 1980s. While initially not deterring buyers due to speculative investment and demand outpacing supply,[...]