March 13th, 2006

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Mixed Bag
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US Faces Mortgage Madness

Here’s a rare lesson on macro-economics from DB.com. As The Big Picture reports, things are looking ominous for a lot of American homeowners:

More than $2 trillion of U.S. mortgage debt, or about a quarter of all mortgage loans outstanding, comes up for interest-rate resets in 2006 and 2007, estimates Moody’s Economy.com, a research firm in West Chester, Pa.

I take it there was a house-buying boom four or five years ago? I wonder, will there be a similar trend in Canada?

Comments: One Response so far

Andrea
March 13th, 2006
10:27 am

The boom started before the Canadian one. Americans were incented to go deeper in debt because they can write off interest and they had 0% down earlier. So people go into debt for more than they can afford because they figure they can just write off the interest. The problem is that the interest rate has come up and many of those barely-making-it folks will have little equity to soften the blow. And they also have credit cards, car loans, home equity loans (default on that and lose the house), and other forms of credit.

Canadians will see some contraction following interest rate hikes. However, they aren’t in quite as much debt, since we don’t write off interest. And we have a lot of foreign investment in markets like Vancouver, as well as a booming economy and no major war debts. But that doesn’t mean we’ll be fine.

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