House buyers' job.

Low interest rates since BOC's overnight rate hit 2% in 2001 after a long neoliberal decline beginning in 1980 have driven house prices in Canada parabolic, particularly after the 2008 Great Recession (which just happens to have been caused by the collapse of a mortgage bubble), when BOC's overnight rate flattened to essentially zero percent and stayed there for about twelve years.

Mortgage rule changes Ottawa is implementing to enable "more people to buy a house," reported in a Sept. 16, 2024, CBC News article, "Canada relaxes some mortgage rules to tackle housing crisis," are designed to prevent house prices from correcting – to kick the can down the road, in other words – and keep holders who bought near the top and the banks who sold them their mortgages from going off the cliff together if prices fall and holders' loans cost more than they can sell their houses for, walk away, and banks are left holding a pile of bad mortgages and foreclosed houses rapidly declining in price.

The narrative is always "helping buyers get into the market," but those buyers' job is to keep the party going so that banks do not go broke.

Financializing an economy – replacing productive economic activity that creates real wealth with a financial assets casino – always ends this way, whether it will happen now or after however long finance capital's servants in Ottawa are able to keep people buying houses.

Houses are structures in which people dwell.

Financializing housing because it makes a certain slice of the population lots of money for doing nothing is a bad idea. So is making excuses for it. Anyone who knows anything about economic history could have stopped this at any point, but free money is so seductive to people who are addicted to it, it is just about impossible to get through to policy makers, who just happen always to be in money addicts' pockets, and get them to put a stop to it.

What you get instead are mortgage rules changes like those reported in the article mentioned above and these to keep driving house prices higher, not a housing policy whose purpose is to house Canada's population efficiently, meaning with the highest quality, security, and stability at the lowest possible cost.

September 17, 2024 Bill Appledorf