Debt

Knock-on Effect: A secondary, often unintended effect. While I don’t typically write it down, I have often provided my thoughts about Vancouver’s real estate market when I speak to others in person. Vancouver has had a run-up in real estate for 9 years now, one of the largest and longest real estate bubbles ever. Oh, did I say “bubble”? Many people won’t admit that it is a bubble, and yet there is little else to explain housing prices that have doubled – nay, tripled – in nearly 10 years. This false wealth by rising real estate values has caused a lot of snobbery and abusive spending, causing inflation in many ways. ...

This Bloomberg article answers exactly what I’ve been questioning for the past 8 years: how is it that people in Canada (and Vancouver, in particular) can afford to live such extravagant lives? Well, the answer is that they can’t. And I knew that they couldn’t live their lives like that, but I never had any empirical evidence to back it up. The article displays the following graphic at the top, to highlight just how screwed us Canadians are in the near term. ...