2016-12-27

Chinese Watch Canadian Central Bank's Housing Warning

iFeng has a translated version of this ZeroHedge article on its finance homepage: Bank Of Canada Lays Out In YouTube Clip How The Economy Could Tank
There is good news, Slive says. Stress tests show Canada’s big banks will be just fine even with a large drop in house prices (stress tests also showed that both Belgian Dexia and Spanish Bankia were perfectly solvent just months prior to their respectively failrues). It’s also important to note that the Bank, in its financial system review, said there is a “low probability” of a sharp correction in house prices. But there’s no getting around the immense damage such a scenario would have on the economy.

The video is a break from regular fare on the Bank of Canada’s YouTube channel, which is largely made up of speeches by top Bank officials. And even if Slive’s delivery is trademark central-banker dry, the message is stark, and shows the Bank is desperate for Canadians to heed its warnings on debt and rising house prices.

If there’s one quibble to be made, it’s with the initial domino that the Bank sees setting everything in motion—a severe recession leading to job losses. Since the U.S. housing bubble popped and that country went into its long, dark funk, a chicken-versus-egg debate has raged over whether the housing collapse triggered the U.S. recession, or whether something else, like soaring oil prices, brought on the recession and turned the housing slowdown into a total collapse. What’s beyond debate is that America’s housing market reached its frothiest in mid-2006, and then began its decline, one-and-a-half years before the recession began.

Whatever the case, the Bank’s video should be another wake-up call for Canadians, but "not that anyone’s listening" as Jason Kirby laments.
iFeng: 加拿大央行五张漫画告诉你:为什么不能让房价暴跌?

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