The Canadian housing mantra was always we're different from the US because:
- you can't walk away from your mortgage like you can in the US
- Our banks hold onto the mortgages they write, especially the sub prime ones as they can't liquidate them so the banks are more careful about handing out these types of mortgages.
- most of our mortgages that are written are backed by the government
- due to not having a vast secondary market for mortgages and derivative products, we don't write that many sub prime mortgages.
This was all true around 2008, now, it's debatable but IMHO only point one is correct any more.
http://business.financialpost.com/news/fp-street/rbc-explori...
The Canadian housing mantra was always we're different from the US because:
- you can't walk away from your mortgage like you can in the US
- Our banks hold onto the mortgages they write, especially the sub prime ones as they can't liquidate them so the banks are more careful about handing out these types of mortgages.
- most of our mortgages that are written are backed by the government
- due to not having a vast secondary market for mortgages and derivative products, we don't write that many sub prime mortgages.
This was all true around 2008, now, it's debatable but IMHO only point one is correct any more.