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Posted by: John Dunford
Canada shed 88,000 jobs in January, the most significant drop in nine years, driven by a record 137,000 plunge in part-time work. Full-time employment was up 49,000 while the unemployment rate increased a tick to 5.9%–only slightly above the lowest jobless rate since 1976. January’s sharp decline brings to an end a stunning 17-month streak […]
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Five weeks into the latest B-20 regime is all it’s taken for brokers to sound off. Homebuyers are having trouble qualifying for mortgages, as was predicted, and many are securing loans from the private channel. According to Ron Butler of Butler Mortgages, in the name of cooling down two overheated markets, the government has callously acted against […]
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Gary Mauris had a one-on-one sit-down with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and asked him about one issue that seems to perennially be on every broker’s mind. Did his answer satisfy? “The biggest issue and the biggest challenge that I see in this country right now and the one area I believe you can really, really help […]
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Federal Reserve officials, meeting for the last time under Chair Janet Yellen, left borrowing costs unchanged while adding emphasis to their plan for more hikes, setting the stage for an increase in March under her successor Jerome Powell. “The committee expects that economic conditions will evolve in a manner that will warrant further gradual increases […]
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While the Bank of Canada’s latest increase in its overnight interest rate is a move marked with characteristic caution, a combination of existing factors means that the hike will still make significant waves in the nation’s economic engine, according to Dr. Sherry Cooper of the Dominion Lending Centres. The BoC’s decision to increase the rate to […]
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All but one of Canada’s six biggest commercial lenders now say the central bank will raise interest rates this month after the jobless rate dropped to its lowest in modern records. Toronto-Dominion Bank, Bank of Nova Scotia, Royal Bank of Canada and the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce changed their forecasts after a Statistics Canada […]
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You might think you would be rewarded for toiling away to save a down payment of 20% or greater. Well, forget it. Your only prize for all that self-sacrifice is paying a higher interest rate than people who didn’t bother. Once upon a time we had high ratio vs conventional mortgages, now it’s changed to; […]
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The highly anticipated December Labour Force Survey, released this morning by Stats Canada, surpassed forecasts breaking multi-year records. Canada’s jobless rate fell to 5.7% in December, its lowest level in more than 40 years, raising the prospects for a Bank of Canada rate hike possibly as soon as this month. The number of jobs rose […]
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James Loewen believes the government has catalyzed the very thing it is trying to prevent with the recent B-20 changes, and the irony isn’t lost on him. Loewen says that most borrowers will be stuck in the private channel, and will have to walk away from their homes. The resulting supply surge in tandem with […]
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The real reason the government has introduced stringent mortgage stress testing, claims a mortgage broker, is because it wants Canadians to spend less money on mortgage payments and more on other segments of the economy. “The government sees Canadians making their mortgage payments as a problem because they won’t spend their money in other sectors […]
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