The Bank of Canada bubble

Canada is not alone in facing a housing-price policy panic. There are housing bubbles expanding all over the global economy. A Google search produced links to alarming reports of double-digit house-price rises on multiple continents. Shanghai is in a bubble. So is Sweden, the main cities in Australia, and Hong Kong. London is about to burst (but hasn’t yet) and San Francisco is in the midst of another bubble — along with Amsterdam.

What a coincidence! Not likely. All these manifestations of soaring housing prices have one thing in common: central banks that maintain historically low interest rates to stimulate economic activity.

If low central-bank rates of near zero per cent are the main reason buyers are willing to drive house prices into bubble territory, then the policy question will eventually come around to focus on central banks. If low rates are the cause of bubbles, then maybe we should eliminate the cause.

A minority chorus of economists, bucking the conventional wisdom, are calling for the Bank of Canada to step up and stick a big interest-rate pin into the overheated and overblown Canadian housing market. Home price inflation is “on fire” and running ahead of economic fundamentals, said National Bank of Canada economist Stéfane Marion in a note this week. “The use of interest rates to cool things down is justifiable.”

David Rosenberg, chief economist at Gluskin Sheff and Associates, agrees. Writing in the Financial Post on Saturday, Rosenberg concluded a lengthy five-alarm housingbubble column with a call for the central bank to put out the fire. “Maybe it is time for the Bank of Canada to start playing a role and follow the Fed on (a) gradual rising interest rate path.”

The majority of economists would likely disagree with Marion’s idea that the bank — as early as this Wednesday — should reverse its stimulus narrative “and abandon its easing bias.” No such action can be expected from the bank, which has so far stuck to its belief that the housing bubble in cites like Toronto is a function of economic fundamentals — high growth, rising wages, increasing demand. To raise interest rates for the sole purpose of cooling off a single sector — an overheated regional housing market — would inflict damage on other sectors of the economy that are still struggling.

Without evidence or confidence that the house-price bubbles pose a serious threat to growth or future inflation risk, the bank has no solid reason to use its only active policy tool — interest rates — to put out a price blaze that involves only part of the country and a relatively small part of the economy.

That, at least, is the conventional argument. As Marion sees it, however, there is already evidence the economy is percolating along. Labour markets are tightening — hours worked are up sharply and employment rates are higher for prime-age (25- to 54- year-old) workers. Wage inflation seems likely.

In housing, the current bubble conditions are having a disruptive impact on 55 per cent of the national housing market. Marion’s data show that housing prices in Canada have tripled since 2000, while they have only doubled in the United States.

Rock-bottom interest rates, Marion contends, are inconsistent with trends in the economy. While five-year government Treasury bill rates have risen slightly this year, the best-available five-year mortgage rate has not. A signal from the Bank of Canada that interest rates are going up might strengthen the dollar, but Marion says “that is a lesser bad given the potential danger of ongoing price rises in many regional housing markets.”

Whether Marion and Rosenberg are right or not, it is clear that the prolonged maintenance of low interest rates is the helium in Canada’s housing market — and in the housing markets in other urban centres around the world, from Stockholm to Sydney.

The bubble risks associated with central banks’ exclusive focus on interest rates to maintain price stability have been well known. In his 2013 Hanson lecture, former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney saw the 2008 financial crisis as a lesson in how economic regimes can spin out of control.

A central lesson of the 2008 crisis, he said, is that price stability and low interest rates “can be associated with excessive credit growth and emerging asset bubbles, which in turn can ultimately compromise the achievement of price stability.” Carney added: