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Canadian Household Debt-to-Income Ratio Near Record High

“Households with elevated levels of debt are more vulnerable to increases in interest rates”, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation redundantly observes in its latest bulletin and warns that “with interest rates on the rise, highly indebted households could see their increased required payments exceed their budgets.”

Naturally, this increased debt payment burden usually come at the cost of reduced consumption, decreased savings or opting to make lower repayments on principal amounts. Some households might even default on their loans if their incomes are not sufficient to cover higher expenses and credit charges.

And, as the CMHC ominously warns, if an increasing number of borrowers begin to default on their loans, financial institutions may decrease lending activities in response.

These negative effects could then impact other areas of the economy. Research has shown that recessions in highly indebted countries tend to exhibit a greater loss in output, higher unemployment, and last longer compared to countries with lower debt levels.

Here are some of the latest troubling observations on Canadian household debt levels from the CMHC:

Household debt to disposable income near record levels

The debt-to-income (DTI) ratio is a measure of the relative vulnerability of indebted households. While households may be able to service their debt during periods of low interest rates, some may face challenges when rates rise. Highly indebted households have usually few debt consolidation options to respond to increasing debt service costs.

Total household debt relative to disposable income has been trending higher as indebtedness has been rising faster than incomes, with mortgage debt being a major contributor, counting for two-thirds of all outstanding household debt in Canada. While the increasing trend in the Canadian DTI ratio has now paused, it remains near a record high, hovering around 170% in Canada and varies significantly among Canada’s metropolitan areas (see chart 1).

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“Canada Is In Serious Trouble” Again, And This Time It’s For Real

Some time ago, Deutsche Bank’s chief international economist, Torsten Slok, presented several charts which showed that  Canada is in serious trouble” mostly as a result of its overreliance on its frothy, bubbly housing sector, but also due to the fact that unlike the US, the average Canadian household had failed to reduce its debt load.

Additionally, the German economist demonstrated that it was not just the mortgage-linked dangers from the housing market (and this was before Vancouver and Toronto got slammed with billions in “hot” Chinese capital inflows) as credit card loans and personal lines of credit had both surged, even as multifamily construction was at already record highs and surging, while the labor market had become particularly reliant on the assumption that the housing sector would keep growing indefinitely, suggesting that if and when the housing market took a turn for the worse, or even slowed down as expected, a major source of employment in recent years would shrink.

Fast forward to last summer, when the trends shown by Slok three years ago had only grown more acute, with Canada’s household debt continuing to rise, its divergence with the US never been greater…

… making the debt-service ratio disturbingly sticky.

And yet despite all these concerning trends, virtually all of these red flags have been soundly ignored, mostly for one reason: the “wealth effect” in Canada courtesy of its housing market grew, and grew, and grew

Looking at the chart above, Bloomberg recently said that:

On a real basis, Canadian housing prices experienced a much smaller, shorter decrease in prices during the financial crisis and a much larger, longer increase in prices during the recovery. When you couple this unfathomable rise in housing prices with near-record high household debt-to-income ratios, the Canadian housing bubble starts to look scary should the tide turn.

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