Canada

Shortly after yesterday's rate hike by the Bank of Canada, its first since 2010, we warned that as rates in Canada begin to rise, the local economy which has seen a striking decline in hourly earnings in the past year, which remains greatly reliant on a vibrant construction sector, and where households are the most levered on record, if there is anything that can burst the local housing bubble, it is tighter monetary conditions. And a bubble it is, as the chart below clearly demonstrates...

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 household had failed to reduce its debt load in time.

We've spent a fair amount of time discussing Canada's housing market over the past several months as Chinese money laundering operations have sprouted up bubbles all over the place.  Here's a modest sampling of our recent work:

Content originally published at iBankCoin.com

This wasn't a case of mistaken identity or wrongful imprisonment. Omar Khadr admitted to killing an American soldier -- but was still awarded $10.5m by Canada's supreme court, and an official apology by the Canadian government, for violating his civil rights. Nothing can be funnier than the state of doom for the civilization that pretends to exist north of our borders.

Authored by Aaron Mackey, Corynne McSherry, and Vera Ranieri via The Electronic Frontier Foundation,

A country has the right to prevent the world’s Internet users from accessing information, Canada’s highest court ruled on Wednesday.

In a decision that has troubling implications for free expression online, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a company’s effort to force Google to de-list entire domains and websites from its search index, effectively making them invisible to everyone using Google’s search engine