Consumer confidence is surging just as banks brace for defaults. What's going on?
Warnings come thick and fast
The gloomy warnings have been coming thick and fast. On Wednesday, the latest arrivals to the misery party were the Canadian commercial banks. BMO and Scotiabank were the first in what is likely to be a trend by all the Canadian banks to set aside extra hundreds of millions of dollars — more than a billion for BMO — to cover loans that borrowers cannot afford to pay back in full.
While those numbers are large, they are not as large as they would be if the taxpayer didn't cover mortgage default losses. This week, however, the government agency that has to pay out if mortgage loans go bad had warnings of its own.
"We see early warning signs that more and more consumers are getting into financial difficulties," said CMHC's deputy chief economist Aled ab Iorwerth in
a release on Tuesday.
In the past, Canadians have been reliable in paying back their loans, especially the mortgages that make up so much of our borrowing. But as longtime financial advisor and author Hilliard Macbeth has
warned in the past, this time could be different.
There are signs ab Iorwerth and the CMHC could be coming around to a similar perspective. While current debt levels are not necessarily dangerous alone, ab Iorwerth said rising interest rates and the risk of a downturn that leads to unemployment could do serious damage to Canada's economy.