One of the (many!) problems associated with living next to the US is the potential for confusing their problems with ours. The state of the housing market is a case in point.

Here is a graph of US and Canadian housing starts:

(I particularly like this graph because I was able to preserve the ‘rule of ten’ correction for comparing US and Canadian numbers on the vertical axis). Although housing starts in the US have been falling over the past two years, they’ve held pretty steady up here. That last observation looks a bit worrying, but it appears that there’s an explanation: December was an exceptionally bad month for winter weather.

And then there’s today’s release of December’s building permits data:

Although the value of new permits is still off its peak, there’s still no sign of a US-style meltdown.

Yet.