the Wealthy Canadian

There is an interesting article in the Globe today titled, “Oil patch cuts claim Alberta’s high-paying jobs.”  For those who don’t know, Alberta is Canada’s hub of the energy sector.  Alberta, has (some may say had) huge reserves of oil and gas, has the infamous heavy oil projects and Calgary (the largest city) is home to numerous energy/exploration head offices.  During this most recent bull market in commodities, Alberta has been in the forefront of the Canadian economy.  As energy prices rose, so too did wages, inflation, and in combination with a fantastic housing boom (bubble) – real estate.

All of the jobs numbers from around the world are showing the same things, people are losing jobs.  Since Alberta was really driving Canada’s economy seeing that people are losing jobs and taking pay cuts there is the confirmation that we’ve been expecting.  None of this really comes as a surprise of course with oil worth less than a third of what it was a year or two ago.  My point is simply that the good times are over.  Canada’s manufacturing sector was lagging for a long time and the US housing market started to collapse a few years ago already.  But now that Alberta has finally succumbed the peak in the Canadian economy is over as well.

The other side of this is related to real estate.  Calgary real estate peaked about a year about already.  The absorption rate (the time is would take, statistically, to sell a house) is around 10 months, but prices have not fallen very much.  The key was that there were still low unemployment and many high-paying jobs.  In fact, one reason for the dramatic rise in real estate prices was the high income earners were looking to jump aboard the express train of high yielding real estate.  When prices stopping rocketing to the sky it didn’t matter because speculators were able to hold multiple properties, either by renting out the excess or being comfortable allowing their high wages to carry them through the rough patch.  Now that people are losing jobs it will be the time to really pay attention to house prices.