journal features

a good crack at explaining the Vancouver housing bubble

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2017.03.08

I've come across a really good explanation of the Vancouver housing bubble, from SFU. The truly maddening thing is that no one (certainly least of all the good folks at CREA or the terrified national and provincial governments) is issuing any hard facts or even discussing the matter. The report's here.

We're no longer talking about a simple real estate bubble. Canada's citizens have led us to a massive debt problem. We're now carrying 300% of GNP in debt, up in the rarefied stratosphere with Japan.

rand()m quote

Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.

—Michael Crichton