Group items tagged

Finance Minister Jim Flaherty has tightened mortgage rules three times and put the federal housing agency’s books under regulator oversight

Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney has repeatedly warned household debt is the economy’s biggest domestic risk.

Canadian housing starts rose to the highest since September 2007 last month

“How many new lending ‘guidelines’ can the market bear before it breaks?”

“The market may break because the fundamentals are not sound (i.e. overvaluation of homes), not because of OSFI guidance,” Melessanakis wrote in response.

Canadian existing home sales rose 0.8% in April from the previous month and 11.5% from a year earlier

The average home price rose 0.9% from April 2011,

Four Canadian banks were among the world’s six strongest in Bloomberg’s second annual rankings.

Lenders have been increasingly skeptical of the need for new rules to cool the housing market

Flaherty reduced the amortization period on mortgages backed by the government to 30 years from 35, the third time since 2008 he has tightened rules for home loans

Flaherty introduced legislation April 26 that includes measures to strengthen oversight of Canada Mortgage & Housing Corp.

The law allows OSFI to review CMHC’s books at least once a year, and prohibits banks from using insured mortgages to back covered bonds,

Canadian banks should not be “lulled into a false sense of security” by steps policy makers are taking to prevent another financial crisis

“Are the banks equipped to handle a 40% drop (what occurred in Toronto market in early 1990’s)?

in some places like Vancouver, maybe Toronto, obviously you’re going to have greater risk there of price volatility,”

OSFI’s guidelines suggest lenders limit home-equity lines of credit to 65% of the property’s value.

last financial institution failure in Canada occurred in 1996, when Security Home Mortgage Corp. collapsed

Security Home Mortgage had assets of $65-million the year before it failed.

Eighteen financial institutions failed in the 1990s, including Confederation Life Insurance Co., which had $19.2-billion in assets at the end of 1993. There were 23 failures in the 1980s, including Northland Bank, which had $1-billion in assets

“Fiscal consolidation in the United States and Europe, flexible exchange rates and structural policies to stimulate domestic demand in the emerging-market economies of Asia,

Delays, meanwhile, could have “severe negative consequences,” leading to “a significantly weaker global economy” and a less stable global financial system.

world economic activity would be 7 per cent lower in 2015.

The clear message here is both sides of this delicate dance not only need to do their part but, just as crucial, they need to co-ordinate their efforts.

A lot of this will sound familiar to anyone who follows global economics from the point of view of the Bank of Canada. Governor Mark Carney also chairs the Financial Stability Board, a G20-linked body tasked with making international finance less of a threat to the wider economy, so he has spoken on these issues many times and outlined the potential benefits of adopting stricter banking rules. But the message about global co-ordination is still ti

mely.

Chinese imports barely grew in April, causing the country's trade surplus to balloon to $18.4-billion (U.S.) from $5.3-billion the previous month, indicating that consumers and businesses in the faster-growing emerging markets are still not ready to pick up

China, until recently, had made strides in narrowing its current-account surplus (which reflects the country’s over-reliance on exports as opposed to domestic spending).

U.S. trade deficit that grew 14 per cent in March

The U.S. itself is now a more balanced economy that relies less on debt-fuelled spending.

But it is smaller and weaker than it was at its pre-crisis peak, and will probably never regain that past form. So its ability to drive global growth is limited

work together and get this right, or both will suffer.