alt Hacker NewsI have a (admittedly unevidenced) hypothesis that the US took off from other economies after ‘08 because real estate became a spectacularly shit investment overnight and investors had to invest in productive things for returns. Investors in Canada kept passing the same pieces of land between each other for no benefit to society. My pipe dream is that Canada grows the balls to annhilate property values
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Even if real estate were to implode, Canada has a pretty much permanent sickness on account of being a "rip n' ship" resource exporter over everything else. Since confederation.
It lends itself to a rentier capitalist model, and to oligarchies, and to a stagnant conservative investment class that just wants to coast off their proximity to resources.
Real estate coasting is arguably even worse, but not by much.
Notably the United States is actually trying to make this worse with their tariffs on us. Alberta oil and gas is tariff free while our value added manufacturing sectors are highly tariffed.
It makes no sense to try to kill Quebec's aluminum sector since it's the most logical place to smelt aluminum on the whole continent, but they're trying to, anyways.
They kept selling residential property to foreign money launderers. In the US that activity is confined to major metros where it impacts the more distributed population density less significantly.