Wonders never cease. A mainstream financial news outlet finally gets on the right track. My main criticism of the op-ed is that it doesn’t identify the root causes of the lack of capital creation: the collapsing fiat monetary system and the exponential rise in unpayable debt. While residential real estate has been booming, the real drivers of economic growth, such as business investment in plant and equipment, have been declining for years.

Such a multi-year decline in the tools available to the average member of Canada’s workforce is very likely unprecedented. The only historical period where consistent data (if it existed) might show something similar is the depression of the 1930s. From the perspective of Canadian workers, our economy is decapitalizing.

Who knew that the roadblocks erected over the years that made housing progressively more expensive would now be trumpeted as the savior of the housing market? In the topsy-turvy world of the left-wing corporate media, this hash is what passes for analysis these days.

Canada’s housing agency has cut its national home price forecast for this year and next, saying that interest rates were rising faster than it anticipated – but the agency is not predicting a sharp correction because it said a housing shortage will support prices.

“I have trouble believing in a very big price correction,” Mr. Dugan said. “I don’t want to say that it can’t happen. It is possible for a 10-per-cent price correction like some people are saying. But I’m just leery of that because of the supply shortage,” he said.

I’m pretty certain that various American government agencies made similar predictions in or around 2008.

Given the current state of the monetary system, buying a house on these terms is like walking into a minefield.

Canadians flocked to variable-rate mortgages in the months before the Bank of Canada began rapidly hiking interest rates this year, driving their share of the market above 50 per cent, a report by the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation showed on Wednesday.

“These households will see the largest rate increase because they took out a mortgage when rates were at or near record lows. This is particularly true of the historically large number of households that opted for variable-rate mortgages,” it said.