[Gondring]

IF the Canadian banks were forced to give out bad mortgages under threat of penalties, would they be in such good shape?

Perhaps there’s more involved than this opinion piece is stating.

[tgusa]

Excellent point. Maybe we can send Frank, Dodd, Pelosi et. al. up there?

[dennisw]

IF the Canadian banks were forced to give out bad mortgages under threat of penalties, would they be in such good shape?

I guess they are just a bunch of hard hearted socialists up there plus no minorities to speak of to ladle out affirmative action mortgages to

But Lehman was leveraged at 30-to-1 as it packaged CMOs at breakneck speed. No Canadian bank was allowed this kind of leverage. An easy bet is they didn't get involved much in derivatives and credit default swaps either

[Squawk 8888]

That’s a very good point but the banks in Europe and Asia got into trouble because they bought too much American sub-prime paper. The Canadian banks were also hit by that but their exposure was a lot lower, IOW they didn’t gamble more than they could afford to lose.