Canada's Housing Bubble

Mar 15, 2011 John P. Hussman, Ph.D. hussmanfunds.com

Over the past decade, investors have seen near-parabolic advances in a variety of assets, followed by crashes. These have included dot-com stocks (which peaked and crashed well before the general market peak in 2000), technology stocks, housing, commodities, and stocks in a variety of emerging markets. These experiences have made investors somewhat more attuned to the destructive potential for speculative bubbles in various assets, but has also created something of a "casino economy" where a great deal of resources are directed in hopes of participating in these bubbles.

What exactly is a "bubble?" Informally, we can think of a bubble as an advance in an asset's price to levels that are "detached from fundamentals" - essentially, the primary motive for investing ceases to be the expectation of future cash flows or consumption, and instead centers on the expectation of further increases in price. From this perspective, a bubble emerges at the point where a continual increase in the ratio of prices to fundamentals is required in order for investors to achieve satisfactory returns.

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