Joseph E. Barbuto, director of research at the Economic Longwave Research Group in Toronto, says: “We have all the precursors: overvalued real estate predicated on cheap credit and record private debt levels. It’s not if these bubbles burst; it’s when.
“There’s nothing [that regulators and governments] can do because they’re going to attempt to do everything in the book that Japan did [in the early 1990s]. But it still didn’t stop their deleveraging from occurring,” he adds.