Celente, a heterodox thinker whose vast body of work includes predicting, among other things, the Great Recession, likens the contemporary financial system to the plantation economy, only circumstances are far more propitious for today’s plantation owners because they don’t lodge and feed their serfs.
“You get a job at Walmart or Amazon or Home Depot or Lowe’s—any of the big chains—and you make nothing, go home, live paycheque to paycheque and can’t afford to buy food, so you eat crap, and then go back to work,” Celente said.
“Look at the data that came from Oxfam at the beginning of the Davos meeting about the one per cent becoming, what, $27 trillion richer since 2020. Everybody is going down. The money is all being gobbled up to the top.”
The panacea to housing unaffordability today is preponderantly parents gifting children down payments for, or even outright purchasing them, starter homes so they can build equity. However, for the rest, affording a Toronto-area home that averaged $1,189,850 at the end of 2022 is insuperable—especially when factoring inflation, which shows nary a sign of dissipation.
“If you’re a person starting from nothing whose parents were renters, barring winning the lottery, your ability to put a down payment on a house in excess of a million dollars, or a small condo that’s $750,000, is increasingly difficult. Where will you find money to start the process?” said Ron Butler, owner of Butler Mortgage in Toronto.