The piece struck me as about half blatant big-finance propaganda, piggy-backing on the relatively reasonable points in the other half. (Classic reinforcing technique in propaganda.) That "pro lender" crap struck me as particularly offensive, but maybe it was intended to be red meat. On balance, that was actually one of Tom's better referrals.

The thing is, goth, I've come to view America's real estate market as the world's grandest Ponzi scheme. Earliest investors make money on inflation, later investors lose when the bubble bursts; like a Ponzi scheme, real estate falls apart when new generations of would-be buyers can no longer afford paying ever-higher prices to fund the payouts of those cashing out.

The first graph shows the American market twice as volatile on the upside as the Canadian market, and four times as volatile on the downside. That's not optimum. Canada really does seem to have a sounder financial sector. Imagine that, an American with Canada-envy...

As the article asserts, in America it's a "political obsession with homeownership", and a bipartisan one. Every American politician just loves to bray that "home ownership is the American dream!". That notion took off after World War II, first as a reward given to returning veterans (VA loans), later generalized as a universal aspiration, if not quite a right. The pressure in American politics for half a century has been unremittingly toward expanding home ownership, by hook or by crook.

Inflating real estate ownership into some kind of civic duty or the minimal ticket to the American Good Life really did result in "misguided policies to turn good, low-income renters into bad homeowner". We stopped viewing the problem as one of providing shelter for everyone, and turned it into a problem of finding financing for everyone. What's wrong with renting? Especially when the taxpayers are helping.

Not that I've suddenly turned wingnut. There was a lot of pro-big-finance spin in that article. I don't buy for a minute that Canadian banks are more conservatively-managed because they're freer of regulation. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit! We've seen in tragic detail the fine correlation between risk-taking and relaxation of oversight and regulation. We need to pull that choke chain as tight as we can, and never turn our backs on the beast. Seriously. The centrality of finance to the health of every other part of the economy makes it a matter of national security that finance never be allowed to go off the rails.

And you're welcome for the hockey game.