Fictitious capital versus ships.

An instructive juxtaposition occurred on the CBC News homepage on August 25, 2025.

One article, "Is now the moment for first-time buyers to get into the housing market?" provided a rogues' gallery of sell-side marketers a platform to convince households that the decline in condo prices since topping in Q2 2022 after a 21-year run driven by near-zero BOC overnight interest rates presents a "buyer's market": Buy now! Look how far condo prices have fallen!

Buy-side analysts, by contrast, whose audience is speculators and thus evaluate market upside for a living, see condo prices that have outrun the ability of renters to meet the demands of holders who rent their condos out. This is a huge blow to developers, who depend for financing on presales to so-called "investors," because rent-seekers' attention is turning away from housing to lower-risk, higher-return vehicles for rent extraction

Developers' difficulty securing financing calls into question whether for-profit housing development can house Canada's population. Publicly financing for-profit housing development is no solution, as parents have no interest today in helping speculators gouge their kids for a roof over their heads tomorrow.

Another article on the same CBC homepage, "Canada needs to catch up with U.S. on job protection, minister says, in response to Chinese ferry deal," decries BC Ferries awarding the contract to build four new electric-diesel ships to a Chinese shipyard and implies, with the sinister expression "state owned firm," that this win is somehow due to the shipyard in question enjoying an unspecified advantage that a "buy Canada" slogan will obviate.

But the root cause of this loss by Canada's ship-building industry is the high cost of living – and therefore high cost of doing business – in Canada because financialization has ridiculously inflated the price of housing here. This is in addition to Ottawa's lack of a coherent industrial policy, consequent underinvestment in public infrastructure, and failure to steer private capital toward long-horizon, high value-added economic activity.

CBC owes Canadians analysis by economists, if any are still around, who have not internalized the fantasy finance capital has been spinning since 1980 that "deindustrialization" – the word – describes a glorious future in which everybody enjoys wonderfully manufactured things and nothing is manufactured; no money is invested in plant, equipment, or educating tomorrow's workforce; you just pour trillions of dollars into buying, selling, and letting real estate, and by magic, "wealth" is created.