Quantitative ease (QE) is a simple concept, but not well understood by most people. Increasingly folks tell me, “QE inflates home prices,” and “prevents prices from dropping.” The first part is true, but the evidence on the second part is a little shaky. It can help to push home prices higher during a tight market, but it also extends inefficiencies. When market inefficiencies are extended too far, it can lead to market failure. If that happens, QE isn’t particularly effective at kickstarting home prices. It can sometimes make things worse.
Quantitative Ease (QE)
First, let’s clarify the basics of supply and demand. When demand grows faster than supply, the price of supply generally rises. If supply grows faster than demand, the price of the supply will generally fall. Most importantly, this doesn’t just apply to buyers and sellers of real estate. It applies to every aspect of a traded commodity, especially credit.
Most people get the home price part, but not a lot of people think about the credit creation part. It’s not as simple as, a lot of people want a product, so prices rise. Prices are bound by the limits of what people can and are willing to pay. Keep this in mind, because we’re going to circle back to it.
Quantitative ease (QE) is when central banks, like the BoC and the Fed, buy bonds or mortgage securities. These state players, with unlimited capital, create demand for these debt instruments. By creating demand, they drive the price up, and push the yields of these instruments lower. Yield is another way of saying the return on capital lent, or the percent paid to you.
The goal is not just to lower yields, or interest paid on the instruments they buy though. Since markets compete for the same capital, the goal is to drop all interest paid lower. By making debt cheaper, they hope companies and households will borrow more. If they borrow more, they can spend more of their future revenue in the near term. This can boost the economy short-term until debt builds up and it’s no longer effective.
Still think this is just one interpretation of the events? Let’s check in with what the Bank of Canada says about QE:
“When the Bank buys government bonds of a given maturity, it bids up their price. This, in turn, lowers the rate of interest that the bond pays to its holders. When the interest rate on government bonds is lower, this transmits itself to other interest rates, such as those on mortgages and corporate loans.”
— Paul Beaudry, Deputy Governor Dec 20, 2020
Despite many people protesting the impact of QE, that’s the goal. Driving mortgage rates and increasing mortgage borrowing is a stated goal. It’s not just a happy accident.
How QE Impacts Home Prices
Lowering the cost of debt does two things — pulls forward demand, and increases budgets. For mortgages, the cheaper rates allow buyers to handle more debt earlier. Ideally, they can use the lower mortgage payments to offset some down payment savings. Or even afford mortgage payments sooner than if they had to wait for a raise. By allowing buyers to purchase sooner, they create more demand in the short term.
Increasing the budgets of the current buyers works in tandem with this mechanic in a busy market. The demand pulled forward, which means more competition for the same units. Existing buyers, who can now spend a little more, can absorb price increases more easily. If a market is busy, the combination of these two can make home prices go parabolic.
Think of it like a tube of toothpaste. If there’s a cap on the tube, squeezing it won’t send toothpaste everywhere. If you take the cap off and give toothpaste room to flow, it will make a mess. Arguments of things like density are entirely secondary to credit expansion. You can’t get blood from a stone, or squeeze toothpaste out of a capped tube.
Folks like to argue factors like density, and the limited supply is behind higher prices. However, those factors are entirely secondary to pay. If density were the primary factor, Haiti and Mumbai would be more expensive than Toronto. Instead, Toronto is a city with a density similar to Philadelphia, trading at more than 3x the price. It has to do with how much people can, and are willing to pay.
Great, QE Can Inflate Home Prices Forever?
Short answer, no. The longer answer, extending market inefficiencies works until it doesn’t. Japanese real estate is the only market that has shown the long-term effects of QE on a real estate market. The country’s epic bubble pop in the 90s led them to a nearly zero rate policy by 1999. By 2001, they dabbled in QE — having no room to cut anymore. They’ve flooded their commercial banks and households with credit for 30 years now. It doesn’t work.
Japanese Residential Real Estate Prices
An inflation adjusted index of Japanese home prices. Source: BIS; Better Dwelling.Japanese real estate prices peaked in the early 1990s, and still haven’t recovered. Real home prices peaked in Q1 2019, and are 38% below Q3 2020. Despite trying to use QE to bring the market up in 2001, it had virtually no effect.
Some blame this on Japan’s shrinking population, but timelines are important. Japan’s population stopped growing after its epic real estate bubble collapse. Not before.
Japan’s housing bubble may have actually resulted in a falling population. Low rate policy to preserve home prices meant extending credit faster than wages. Young adults found themselves with home prices that were still out of reach, while job stability disappeared. A totally not relatable story, I know.
From 1995 to 2007, the number of irregular employees in the country increased by 7.6 million people. Today about 40% of the population is employed regularly and would struggle to live on their own. This has led people to stop “coupling,” citing economic insecurity as the number one reason. TL;DR they tried to save home values at the price of a generation. It didn’t work, and the spectacular screw-up destroyed both.
QE can boost home prices if used in a booming market, and has been used to stop prices from cratering. However, extending structural inefficiencies with home prices can lead to the long-term failure of markets. When that happens, it doesn’t quite provide the juice people might think it will if housing impacts labor. A trend countries like Canada are being warned about in the current situation.
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Lost decade has a lot parallels. Asset price inflation, debt driven growth, foreign ownership speculating on it being the next super economy, and it all crashing down.
The only thing we’re waiting for is the decline in credit quality, when all of the highest quality borrowers have borrowed all they want to, and we need to generate liquidity.
Debt issues are already in Canada. Over-leveraged borrowers flourishing, since everyone else is already tapped out.
https://betterdwelling.com/canadian-mortgage-approvals-for-over-leveraged-borrowers-soars-to-a-record-high/
The next super economy? Forgive me but I laughed out loud. Foreign ownership comes here on the pretense that the government will effectively protect the value of their home “investment.” It functions as an effective piggy bank.
You don’t see narratives about Canada becoming an international tech powerhouse like Japan in the 80s. That part of your comparison falls short. The rest I agree with.
This has been a warning for a long time people are ignoring. “Millennials live in their parents basement” will result in sekentei, which a person shame on social standing.
It used to be something only the elderly were afraid of, but as people in their 20s failed to launch, it resulted in young people feeling the same way. Old people feel they’re useless to society in their state, and young people do. Not many basements in Japan either, so they usually spend their time in a room. Really sad stuff.
I’m not really sure that any of these stories and comments will change the trajectory of this craziness/chaos.
There’s two paths. Prices correct, or young professionals find a better place to work. Going long on Canadian talent being highly credentialed, but not smart enough to realize the country is structured to use them as cheap labor, is an odd bet to make.
The bet is good as long as the rational folks remain on the sidelines. Once everyone has poured in an truly believe that “this time its different,” the house of cards comes falling down. Until then, enjoy and live it up. Punch bowl hasn’t been taken away yet.
When the dust settles, who knows what this country will be like. Hopefully I’ll have built a career and exited to the US or parts of Europe. I don’t speak Mandarin and I don’t think I’d fit in well in China so that’s out of the question.
Canada’s pitch is they don’t domestic births, they can just keep attracting wealthy immigrants to replace them. The Canadian skew is getting worse than the American one.
Everyone thinks it’s the greatest country in the world, and quality of life doesn’t matter. Everyone will buy a house just to be like someone that moved here in the 80s, and can’t afford if their property taxes rise just a little bit.
I think people banking on wealthy immigrants should really think again. Canada definitely got a “Trump bump” in terms of high skill, affluent immigrants who could have gone to the US but came here instead because there was a racist loon in the white house.
If I’m someone who has a choice, why am I gonna move to Canada and buy a house in Vaughn for $1million CAD when I can go to the US, live in an equivalent suburb in NJ, pay 1/2 or 2/3 for a house and pay less taxes?
The “400,000 immigrants” argument falls flat when you think about who’s actually gonna be coming.
It doesn’t matter too much who’s coming: the 400,000 people occupy physical space. So the price of the same amount of space goes up. If you want to live in a house of a normal size, well, you’ll have to bid based on the fact that that could be split into 3 parts and divvied up to 3 decidedly un-wealthy families.
Regarding the author’s comment on density, density is not the same thing as demand. You could have a density of 4000/km^2, but no new people are arriving, and about 1% of the houses go up for sale each year. The prices will be reasonable. If you have 1% of the houses going up for sale, and then you’re adding an extra 50,000 people that have nowhere to go, the prices will be huge regardless of whether they make sense in the aggregate, because the supply/demand is between houseless people and houses for sale–it doesn’t matter how dense all the occupied units are.
You must love your CNN. Trump is the best thing that happened to the US in a while, and was only taken out of power only by massive election fraud and fake news. Don’t believe all the propaganda you see on TV and your life will be much more enjoyable.
Yeah I mean, you’re allowed to be wrong, but we can put a pin in that for now. But you can’t tell me he made the country FEEL welcoming to immigrants.
This lines up with your post earlier today, on how Canada spends a ton on social services to produce top talent, and then doesn’t give them enough of an economy to do anything.
Leaders of the world’s biggest financial movement, all Canadian raised. None in Canada. I’ll probably never get over that.
This is what the Liberals want. They want young Canadians to flee the country and be replaced by foreign nationals who will be sprinted to citizenship (what is it now, 2 years residency requirement?) and dutifully vote Liberal for life. I can even imagine the Liberals granting voting rights to non-citizens. Who’s going to stop them?
I think young Canadians should respond with a massive “ok, no prob” and get working on their visas and paperwork to the US, EU, Australia, New Zealand…anywhere, really. A country that has zero loyalty to its youth should expect none in return.
The liberals are indeed delusional but I hesitate to ask what the other party plans to do.
I really don’t think they will do anything significantly different. This mess has been 30+ years of policy in the making. It is, dare I say, the elite consensus now.
I don’t think the LIberals are delusional at all, actually. They know exactly what they’re doing.
They want young Canadians gone, to be replaced by non-Canadians.
Well, I don’t disagree that there is a generational wealth transfer of sorts from young to the old and pushing the young out.
But I also don’t have legitimate faith in other parties to “solve” this issue, frankly. As I said, while this latest housing exuberance has been the fault of the liberals, housing being the de-facto economic strategy of the country has been decades in the making when we hollowed out our country and spent the profits from globalization on non productive, rent seeking assets.
Any legitimate talk of
COoling this market will be met with poor poll performance. Canadian homeowners may not be legitimately getting more wealthy, but they certainly don’t feel that way. And they vote. And there are many of them, unfortunately.
Conservatives would lower immigration and do more things that would benefit the existing population, instead of using the existing population as a line of credit to accomplish other political goals.
You don’t have to have “faith” in the Conservative party. I wouldn’t say they are highly competent, or that they would be harmless. There are just fewer catastrophic things they would do, at this particular moment in history.
Id happily vote for the party that did what you just said, frankly.
Excellent remark. This is very true. I don’t want to see the clowns complaining that young people have fled the country when they embrace unfettered speculation and capital inflows into the RE sector, and simultaneously make it impossible to build quality businesses that can create good jobs.
You cannot have loyalty to a nation that doesn’t even have a long term plan for its populace. You must embrace being mobile, or risk being fed to the rent seeking machine.
Gimme systemic failure! I want to see this collapse in the most spectacular way possible.
Here Here!!!!
I’d actually vote for someone who’d flat out say “I’m going to pop the bubble, it’s going to be bad. Vote for me”.
Reality is, it would be better to just let the market crash. Tons of people would lose tons of money, countless lives would be affected. The downturn would last a couple years and the pendulum would start trending upward again. 5-6 years later Millennials and Gen Zers would get a chance at buying a decent affordable house.
The laughable thing is this pandemic gave the BOC and government the perfect excuse to let the market correct itself. They just needed to lay off the QE. Instead, they did the exact opposite.
We could very well get that wish. Real estate keeps becoming a larger portion of our GDP, which doesn’t sound like a good long term plan. We need to increase productivity, as that leads to more long term stable jobs.
As a millennial, current BoC and federal government policy feels like a giant transfer of wealth from young Canadians to baby boomers. Some millennials are lucky enough to receive wealth transfers back from their parents, but others are not. I’m not sure how many of us in the latter category who have the means to leave will stay here.
There is a big difference…Japan still has an economy that produces goods of value. How many Japanese MNEs can you name? At least 10-20 if not more…and they were able to benefit from China growth during the last decade and now Southeast Asia economic growth. It is not the case for Canada. Apart from real estate, Canada has agrifood and resources and that’s it…
To add to QE, people have the perception that prices will keep going up because there will be an immigrant coming soon who will buy with a 20% premium.
Any working class family immigrating to Canada, esp. Toronto/Vancouver where bulk of the jobs are, can’t think of owning a house. It’s not just housing, everything is expensive in Canada from gas to day care to entertainment. Even job market is not as big in Canada as publicized.
I had an Uber driver the other day that was here on a student visa, who summed it really well.
He said he thought everyone in Canada was wealthy, and realized the wealth is based on taking it from immigrants. There’s no opportunities, they just collect rents from people that come here.
I think there is a belief (among people who live here and were largely born here) that coming here and going deep into debt to buy a house with a yard in Milton for 2 million while holding a job (and maybe a second one on the side) and renting out the basement so you could send you kids to a Canadian university is the immigrant plan and people clearly wouldn’t be coming in the hundreds of thousands if it wasn’t the case. I don’t know how valid that is.
Great post. I’ve been wondering why there hasn’t been a post on Japanese real estate story.
The best part of the story is that the Japanese Emperor’s castle in central Tokyo was at the peak of the bubble worth more than the entire state of California.
I had to actually go and visit the smallish/simple castle to get my head around this part of the Japanese story.
I had to look this up. Amazing.
“At its height, in 1989, real estate in Tokyo sold for as much as $139,000 a square foot—more than 350 times as much as choice property in Manhattan. Such valuation made the land under the Imperial Palace in Tokyo notionally worth more than all the real estate in California.”
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/02/what-was-lost-and-found-in-japans-lost-decade
But Al Sinclair from Remax keeps telling people to overpay and that prices will keep going up. You mean to tell me I shouldn’t be listening to him?
hahahahaha Al Sinclair
Toronto is way over priced. However other places like Ottawa and Hamilton are still investment worthy.
Look, those houses very far from down town core will most likely drop significantly when this thing pops. But, how about those old houses sitting on big lot very close to down town core? They will never build such big lots close to downtown core anymore. So those houses are also worthy of investment.
From the individual perspective it’s wise to engage in this low-productive use of capital investment because, as has been mentioned, the government will support it at various levels. In addition, there is the monopolistic characteristic of land that you mentioned.
From the perspective of policy, is it wise that the Canadian policy makers are making housing and its affiliated sectors the only game in town? Personally I think not. How much longer before Canada continues to become an undesirable place for businesses (not wealthy folks) to invest? I also don’t want to own a leveraged bet in the same place that I am employed in (too much exposure for me).
I’d prefer to keep my money with the Americans and their equity market. Yes its inflated but they are monopolies of a global scope and a strong history of innovation. Canada? Well, its a blip on the international radar. I don’t have as much faith in this country’s markets frankly (regardless of the leverage and tax advantages). Besides, if the American “ponzi schemes” come to an end what makes anyone think ours won’t? Are we somehow insulated? Doubtful.
“worthy of investment”? I thought houses are were supposed to be for living in, not investments.
Where do you expect folks to live, who can’t afford a mortgage? Thankfully there’s profit in real estate investing. This attracts private capital to solve the problem of how to house the economically fragile masses. This has been practiced for thousands of years. Its not perfect, but it works quite well.
“This attracts private capital to solve the problem of how to house the economically fragile masses. This has been practiced for thousands of years.”
Well, that’s one of the less historically literate comments I’ve seen lately.
Exactly. This right here is our biggest problem.
I completely agree. The cult of home ownership in Canada is ridiculous. There are other places in the world where you can just buy a place and live in it, and not have to depend on selling it to retire. Gorgeous and safe places to boot!
And as an FYI, to those thinking my views are because I’m some bitter millennial who can’t get into the housing market: I am indeed a millennial, but I owned a condo in Toronto, sold it for a profit, and now choose to rent instead of buying back into the market because I refuse to be sucked into the ongoing circle-jerk of Canadian real estate.
My money is better spent and invested elsewhere. My dreams are bigger than owning a house; I wish more Canadians felt that way. Many Canadians have become complacent and lack innovation and creativity because one of their main goals is to own a house – pour your blood sweat and tears into paying down the mortgage, decorate the house, etc. That’s it. Pitiable.
Too many words about nothing. QE is just about printing money. QE causes currency devaluation, turning it into garbage paper. Everyone’s savings are diluted. All assets get pricier as a result. Whoever can borrow during a QE period and has enough income to service the debt for a couple of years will wake up “rich” one day. In fact no one is getting richer. Most people will get poorer. Those who can take possession of a hard asset will avoid the devaluation/inflation.
Still, all this sand castle is supported from some perverted economic and development policies. If they loosen up some of the red tape around land development and housing regulations, all can collapse in no time.
“Too many words about nothing”
*proceeds to explain QE incorrectly, despite the words he clearly skipped provides factual evidence of why his explanation is wrong.*
If the government wants to try to fix the housing crises they need to immediately enact several policy changes at once. Such as:
– Capping the number of properties an individual can own to 2
– Eliminate the 30 year amortization
– Tax investment property sales sold with in 2 years of purchase as regular income not gap gains.
– Remove the non conforming rules for LTV under 65% which in its current form is purely equity lending in disguise. Banks should not be lending to these borrowers. That’s what MICS and Private lenders are for.
– Tax refinance equity take outs on investment properties as income. Currently you can refinance an investment property and not be taxed on the equity drawn. If you hold the property till death you avoid paying tax on the equity drawn during your living years. Your estate will pay the tax obviously but who cares you’re dead anyway. This is a form of tax avoidance.
– Reduce the red tape and free up land for development. So builders can build more.
– Create policies and reduce red tape to make it more appealing for purpose built rentals that are geared to families. The shoebox sized condos built in the last 20 years are just too small.
The problem is there is no courage (a major component of leadership) and political will to do what needs to be done. Let’s see what comes out of the upcoming budget. My guess is absolutely nothing but window dressing policy changes that look like they are doing something when in fact those policies will have no effect.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, the BOC is proud to introduce to the Canadian population, it’s newest economic tool…Negative Interest Rates!!!”
Coming soon
I hope not. This will only make a horrible situation that much worse. If anything, they need to move away from cheap credit and work on strengthening the economy from the ground up.
Japan is trying to solve the problem the same way Canada do -immigration.
“Today, nearly 3 million migrants live in Japan out of a population of 126 million. That number is triple the figure in 1990. … In April 2019, Tokyo implemented historic immigration reform, expanding visa programs to allow more than 345,000 new workers to immigrate to Japan over the subsequent five years.”
However they need much more 🙂
Do Canadians know the difference between migrants and immigrants? I get the feeling they conflate the two.
It’s also worth a mention that even with immigration, Ontario’s population growth was projected to slow over the next few years, passing its peak in 2019. That’s the government’s projection, not a private industry forecast.
No one wants to move somewhere with a bad economy. What are you going to do when you get to Canada? Sell houses?
Wrong. Japan’s immigration system isn’t in place to “solve the problem” of housing.
Japan has a hyper-targeted immigration process to bring in workers in specific roles of greatest and urgent need – long-term care workers, first among them. As a percentage of the population, Japan’s intake is tiny compared to Canada’s.
The key philosophical difference is that Japan’s immigration policy was crafted to be in the best interests of Japanese citizens, whereas Canada’s immigration policy is crafted to be in the best interests of foreign nationals (especially wealthy one) and AGAINST the interests of Canadian citizens.
“Ontario’s population growth was projected to slow over the next few years” – Nothing gives me an allergic reaction like people talking about changes in the second derivative.
“whereas Canada’s immigration policy is crafted to be in the best interests of foreign nationals (especially wealthy one) and AGAINST the interests of Canadian citizens.”
Such pithy truth, so easy to understand, so impossible to get through the public’s heads.
Most Canadians are in an abusive relationship with their own psyches. You can put graphs right under their noses, but they’ll react like those androids in Westworld–it doesn’t look like anything to them.
A person who focuses on the technical structure of a sentence is a person who cannot distinguish reality from their perspective.
Many years ago, on some random internet message board, a British person I was chatting with described Canadians as the cud-chewers of the English-speaking world, slow-witted and docile. At the time, before I was sufficiently red-pilled, I was offended and even “outraged” at the characterization. However I’ve come to realize how incredibly accurate that description is, and it really hit home once I moved abroad. Canadians really are the most vapid and uninformed people in the western world. How else does one describe people who believe that a country with lousy wages AND lousy quality of life (usually it’s one or the other) is the epitome of excellence?
I agree with you . That was a teaser. 🙂
Japan never had immigration.
So I don’t believe any analogies that refer to Japan. Sure, the population may have been growing until around the peak of that bubble, but it isn’t the same thing. If you opened up immigration to Japan right now, prices would go way up, because people from unstable countries will take out a mortgage on a coffin to live in stable, wealthy countries. Natural increase is a different story. Immigrants arrive as fully-formed adults with home-buying capability, sucking up inventory that is only ever a small fraction of what’s available. People who are born show up in the data, but they don’t require housing for a long time, and they can also get stuck living with family. Immigrants must occupy new units at any cost–they don’t have other options.
I’m willing to change my mind, but I’m just not convinced by any analogies to Japan.
Japan has always had immigration. I lived there in my 20s on a work visa. You’re failing to distinguish between skilled immigration, and person migration. People don’t want to migrate to Japan, because there’s no quality of life. The only people that have it are old people, that keep telling young people they’ll get it later. Much later.
There’s a reason young people are LEAVE Japan.
Do you have stats to show how many young Japanese are leaving their country? I bet the percentage is lower than young Canadians leaving theirs!
Curious what you think young people can do here that they can’t do in Japan? And what an odd statement to make saying there’s no quality of life. I have extended family in Japan and they certainly don’t share your views in the slightest. What I will say is that there isn’t necessarily economic growth and new companies, but that’s the case here as well so it’s not relevant.
The modern young person from India or Pakistan comes here under the expectation that they will thrive like in the 80s but end up working low productivity jobs and Uber-ing while renting a basement in Brampton for an indefinite period of time. How is this better than Japan?
Besides the progressive nonsense where I can change my gender and you can change yours openly, I don’t see the economic benefit.
And don’t say tech because we all know that’s just the American branch pant economy.
What is funny is you smug Canadians bragged about how stable your banks were and how stupid Americans were and you guys have exceeded stupidity….and I don’t understand why you fools think you can just move to the US, trust me we don’t want you here. Stay in the frozen, overpriced underdeveloped country Eh!!!
The Americans were indeed stupid but they countered their stupidity and resolved most of their issues. Canadians on the other hand just kicked the can down the road and whistled in the dark about how their country couldn’t possibly succumb to the manias down south. Of course, this was wrong. On balance, the Canadians may very well prove themselves to be infinitely more stupid than the Americans in this respect in due time. I mean just think about it: There are hordes of people literally bidding up the price of DIRT on the ground.
Also, many of those that want to go down South are professionals looking for a place where their skills are actually valued and they can contribute to organizations. I wouldn’t hate on them.
Two things …….. Japan is different, it has a declining population and little to no immigration. I think eventually the dollar will become worthless, and something will break when the can, can no longer be kicked down the road any further. I suspect in the end more homes will be owned by fewer and the parks will get more crowded as people give up or age out of ever owning there own homes, debt free.
Two takes that imply you don’t understand what you’re talking about.