The IMF on Canada's Housing Market

Image Source: Curry, Bill. Globe and Mail, "IMF warns of significant risks from Canada's housing market",https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/report-on-business/economy/imf-praises-infrastructure-bank-plan-flags-housing-market-concerns/article35160977/?ref=https://www.theglobeandmail.com&service=mobile

Recently came across this article in the globe and mail, the full article can be found here. It seems that once again the IMF is warning Canada that our housing market is overheated and that this may have serious consequences for future economic performance.

Here the IMF notes how the Canadian banks credit ratings were recently downgraded expressing fears over the number of consumer loans and mortgages on their books and the potential risk that they present given the exceptionally high levels of consumer debt.

I was happy to see this little bit in the report:

Ms. Lim's staff statement also took issue with the foreign buyers tax approach introduced in British Columbia and Ontario that "discriminates against non-resident buyers." The IMF states that non-resident activity is not the sole driver of housing prices and the provinces should replace the foreign-buyers taxes with more effective tax changes aimed at discouraging speculative activity.

Where the emphasis is my own.

What are your thoughts on this? Are we heading for a correction? Or, alternatively, is there too much on the line for the government to allow a housing correction to actually happen? If that is the case, can we have this hypothesized 'soft landing'?

feel free to comment below.

A short TED talk I found interesting

first, you may have noticed that posts have slowed down as of late. For those who have been regularly reading and checking back - this is not a new long-run trend. I have found myself in a busy semester, lacking the time to regularly develop and post new articles. That being said, expect a few short posts, like this, and then full ramp up again once we hit mid-June, July.

Onto the video:
Mona Chalabi: 3 ways to spot a bad statistic
https://go.ted.com/CyJb

I found this particularly relevant given all the media attention and criticism (even rejection) of statistics and data/evidence-based decision making.

Some alarming discussion along these lines can be found with a quick google search, and with the recent deletion of some EPA data sets in the United States (Climate change can't be happening if we can't prove it?):

http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-epa-climate-20170501-story.html

What are your thoughts on these? feel free to comment below.