bubble

Last month, the Teranet-National Bank National Composite House Price Index showed that Canadian house price gains while moderating across the board are still robust. Combined with recent evidence of a precipitous drop in transaction volume,…

We are staring into a cyclical downturn in the second half of this year. Behind that is a whole other set of challenges, more structural in nature, which will take years to sort out. Our American friends - except for a small but rather…

the ECB decided to prop up the German economy with low interest rates, rates that produced negative real interest rates and housing bubbles in Ireland and Spain. This was a policy designed to "bail out" the indebted German economy. We…

Not a lot of links today. One link I did want to talk about was the Barron's Roundtable Midyear Update. It's largely the same cast it has been for a few years but for the past few years, the topics have been heavily macro instead of…

From a game theory perspective, the moment one of the 17 eurozone member countries realises it would be better off outside the eurozone, it has everything to gain from being the first mover. We have all been led to believe that a break-up…

Editor's Note: The following is the text of recent remarks on the European sovereign debt crisis made by legendary investor George Soros at the Festival of Economics in Trento, Italy.

Canadian home prices have been growing quite rapidly, particularly as compared to the US. Some may argue that this is justified because Canada's unemployment rate is lower. 8.1% in the US vs. 7.4% in Canada. Is that enough to justify such a…

The Spanish banking system is insolvent and the Spanish government simply does not have the wherewithal to clean it up. This is the problem in Spain that has come to a head, particularly now after the rescue of Bankia, Spain's fourth…

I spoke to Paul Waldie and Brian Milner of the Globe & Mail on BNN's headline on Monday. The big story was JPMorgan Chase and the London Whale trades. JPMorgan Chase's CEO Jamie Dimon, as the leading lobbyists for the hands-off…

Australian house prices peaked in June 2010. The motive force behind Australia’s bubble was the same as in the USA and Japan: accelerating debt drove rising house prices during the boom. Now in both those countries, decelerating debt is…