Whilst I was recently in Toronto I noted that there was a degree of hand wringing about the current state of the property market in Canada and the resultant increase in household debt that had accompanied this. Curious about where we stood I looked up the league table of household debt as a function of GDP and generated the following –
As you can see the Canucks have nothing to worry about. When it comes to investing vast sums of borrowed money into a completely non productive asset class that robs the rest of the economy of vital investment funds we are clearly the best……
Its good to be number one…..
One could interpret this as meaning we are the dumbest nation on the planet. This is particularly true when the debt is purely used to buy depreciating assets and even more so when people draw down their mortgage to buy depreciating assets