The Globe and Mail reports in its Tuesday, Jan. 23, edition that Canadians will be spending more time figuring out ways to stay current on their debt obligations rather than reloading the gun on a debt-financed real estate binge even with the Bank of Canada doing what it should, responding to a decay in total demand growth. The Globe's guest columnist David Rosenberg writes that growth is down to a microscopic pace of 0.5 per cent as of the third quarter of 2023, from 4 per cent the year before and 4.8 per cent two years ago. The first quarter of 2021 was the last time the Canadian economy was flat-lining like this -- and, that was when the BOC's policy rate was 0.25 per cent, not 5 per cent. Mr. Rosenberg says Canadians are still massively overweight in residential real estate on their balance sheets. Residential real estate makes up 45 per cent of total household assets, which is nearly 10 percentage points above the historical norm and far above the 29-per-cent share in the United States. In fact, even at the housing bubble peak in 2005, U.S. residential real estate as a share of total personal balance sheets never topped 34 per cent. Canadians today are 11 percentage points above that U.S. peak.