October 15, 2025 | The Compound Cost of Policy Errors Around Immigration and Housing

A couple of must-read articles from the Globe this week examine Canada’s policy errors around immigration and housing–two tangential, interconnected themes with far-reaching impacts for our economy, present and future. See, How Canada got immigration right for so long–and then got it very, very wrong: Canada conducted a decade-long experiment. The experiment’s principal investigator was the […]

October 14, 2025 | Real Estate Bust Has Legs

The Canadian housing bubble has been deflating since February 2022, and there’s room for it to run. We highlighted the mania and frenzy of financially destructive behaviours in real time, noting that once bubbles pop, property prices typically take years to recover. BMO Senior Economist Robert Kavcic apparently agrees. In a recent note highlighted on Better […]

October 8, 2025 | Round and Round The AI Mulberry Bush

OpenAI currently has a market value of $500 billion, with annualized revenue reported at $10 billion per year. It is not expected to be profitable for another 4 or 5 years and is preparing to raise tens of billions of dollars in debt to fund infrastructure plans. Moody’s has recently flagged the extent to which […]

October 7, 2025 | How The AI Bubble Will Pop and Why We Should All Care

The AI infrastructure boom is the most important economic story dominating the news. However, the numbers don’t add up, and that realization is starting to spread. Read more in,  This is How the AI Bubble Will Pop: Tech companies are projected to spend about $400 billion this year on infrastructure to train and operate AI models. […]

October 6, 2025 | Consumer Collapse in Motion

Add leverage and stir has been the recipe for economic expansion at all costs; thus, the seeds of a credit implosion have been planted (again). We reap what we sow, and so it goes. In this episode of The Weekly Wrap, Steve Eisman interviews Lakshmi Ganapathi from Unicus Research. They discuss why U.S. consumers are […]

October 3, 2025 | DDB: Economic Cracks are Widening

Worthwhile macro update in this segment. Danielle DiMartino Booth, former Fed insider and CEO of QI Research, warns that the US economy is deteriorating rapidly with rising unemployment and corporate bankruptcies despite stock markets reaching new highs. Here is a direct video link.

October 1, 2025 | Economic Hits Keep Coming

While Washington deflects attention with yet another government shutdown standoff, US economic data deteriorated further in September; see US Consumer Confidence Falls to Five-Month Low on Job Concerns. The latest published U.S. Consumer Confidence (Conference Board) index came in at 94.2, down from 97.8 in August (on the lower left since August 2023). The share of […]

September 30, 2025 | Pandemic-Era Policies Crashing Down

The Pandemic policy response saw a frenzied mix of debt forbearance, government handouts, policies aimed at increasing debt to stimulate home buying and speculation, mortgage rates under 2%, and an immigration surge concentrated in a few areas, especially around post-secondary schools. Not surprisingly, as interest rates normalize, immigration slows, and the housing bubble deflates, all […]

September 29, 2025 | Credit Bubbles Cost Fortunes in the End

Years of reckless lending and borrowing are nearing another predictable end: surging defaults and losses. As Oaktree Capital Management’s co-chair and credit specialist, Howard Marks, has noted: “The worst loans are made at the best of times,” when credit and optimism are plentiful. While risk-sellers continue to insist that households are in good financial shape (just as […]

September 24, 2025 | Good News and Bad News

Institutional exposure to equities is at its highest level since November 2007, and American households’ allocation to stocks has surpassed the 2000 tech-bubble highs. Trading volume on U.S. stock exchanges last week reclaimed last April’s record high. At the same time, as debt prices have soared, the yield reward that investors are receiving from owning […]

September 23, 2025 | Canada Paying for Housing Excesses with Interest

Last week, Equifax Canada reported that 286,000 businesses in this country missed a loan payment last quarter. In the Greater Toronto Area, the number of mortgage lenders repossessing homes and selling them has climbed roughly 60 per cent year over year. Ninety-day-plus mortgage delinquency rates are climbing in Greater Toronto, Greater Vancouver and Canada generally, according to data from RBC. […]

September 22, 2025 | Most Have No Idea What’s Happening with Their Money

At the end of June 2025, the Global Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) industry had 14,390 products, with 28,447 listings, from 876 providers on 81 exchanges in 63 countries (source: ETFGI). As shown below, since 2007, the $16.99 trillion USD of global market value was 5.7x the $2.948 Tn in 2015 and 20x the $831 billion of […]

September 17, 2025 | High Hopes on Central Bank ‘Fixers’

Like last September, financial markets have high hopes for rate cuts and dovish comments from the US Fed and Bank of Canada today. Futures markets are pricing 150 basis points of Fed cuts by the end of 2026 (taking Fed policy down to 2.75% to 3%) and 75 basis points from the Bank of Canada […]

September 16, 2025 | Stock Owners Have Learned To Love The Bomb

Since 1950, the S&P 500 index has averaged a 5-year annualized earnings growth rate of 7%. Today, S&P 500 pricing assumes a forward 5-year annualized earnings growth rate of 15% (Rosenberg Research). Leveraging this extraordinary optimism, the S&P 500 is trading at more than 23x 5-year forward earnings expectations, some 28% above the longer-term historical […]

September 15, 2025 | Danielle on CBC Weekend Business Panel

September 12, 2025 | The Storm Hits The Art Market

The salad days of near-zero interest rates enabled excess demand and price-insensitive buying across most sectors all at once; that included art markets. After a euphoric frenzy peaked in 2022, art prices have been falling since, and a world of feeder sectors and businesses is contracting along for the ride. See, The Storm Hits the Art […]

September 11, 2025 | Understanding The Job Loss Cycle

Backward-looking job revisions show the US and Canadian economies have been producing fewer and fewer jobs amid rising unemployment. Mass layoffs are due next. EPB Macro’s Eric Basmajian explains in the segments below. This video analyzes why elevated profit margins are giving businesses more room and time to absorb slowing economic conditions without resorting to […]

September 10, 2025 | Investor Exodus Accelerating Real Estate Downturn

Statistics Canada housing data shows that, in 2021, across the provinces, 15–27% of houses were owned as an investment/secondary property (i.e., not an owner’s primary residence)—with PEI 27%, Nova Scotia 20%, Ontario/Manitoba/New Brunswick/B.C. generally in the mid-teens. Condos skewed higher, with 30–42% of condo apartments owned as secondary properties in the provinces studied. (Perspectives Journal). In related […]

September 8, 2025 | Ontario Real Estate Update

The Toronto area saw the average home price drop for the seventh consecutive year-over-year decline in August. Detached home prices, down 10%, fell more than other property types. The average sales price for all property types has dropped by more than 23 per cent in the GTA (Greater Toronto Area) since the February 2022 price […]

September 4, 2025 | Danielle on Thoughtful Money

After a year of projecting confidence in America’s “strong” and “resilient” economy, at his recent Jackson Hole appearance, Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell suddenly changed his tune. He expressed concern about the deteriorating labor market, saying the situation may warrant a resumption of monetary easing notwithstanding the potential inflationary risks of tariffs. This comes at […]

September 3, 2025 | Bipartisan Congress Members Hold Briefing on Bill to Stop Stock Trading in Legislature

It is wild and indefensible that insider trading by politicians remains rampant. Conflicts of interest queer policy and undermine faith and trust in institutions. And yet, will efforts to ban it ever get passed? Reasonable people hope. Here is a direct video link.

September 2, 2025 | Canada’s Eonomy Disappoints

Canada’s GDP for the second quarter contracted by 1.6% on an annualized basis, following a downwardly revised 2.0% expansion in the first quarter (Statistics Canada), resulting in a total annualized growth of 0.4% for the first six months of 2025. The weakness was in line with Bank of Canada forecasts but significantly worse than the […]

September 1, 2025 | Danielle on The Disciplined Investor Podcast

Markets react to the chance of a rate cut. Summertime lull was anything but boring. September and October await – two of the seasonally worst months for markets. And our guest – Danielle Park, Venable Park Investment Counsel Inc.  

August 28, 2025 | Government and Central Bank Housing ‘Help’ Has Made a Mess

I have said for some time that the housing bubble and now bust is the dominant economic challenge at hand, with broader financial impacts than trade tariffs. Industry participants are starting to agree. Toronto-area new home sales marked the worst July on record, “eclipsing” the 1990s housing downturn, according to a report yesterday from the […]