It’s pretty clear that the explosive growth in the price of Canadian houses over the last decade was the inadvertent product of an emergency plan to rescue global capitalism in 2008.
There’s more evidence of that in a new book, Firefighting: The Financial Crisis and Its Lessons, published this week by former U.S. Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke and two other architects of the rescue plan.
And despite the fact it is widely accepted that Canadian house prices did not need a boost in 2008, a new CIBC report is a reminder of the ambivalence of even the most staid economists over government attempts to withdraw stimulus from the real estate sector after a decade of overheating.