Jul 18 - For the First Time, Canadians Now Richer Than Americans

For the First Time, Canadians Now Richer Than Americans

The average Canadian household is worth about $40,000 more than their American counterparts


While Americans might enjoy throwing politically-charged barbs at their neighbors to the north, Canadians now have at least one reason to be smug.

For the first time in recent history, the average Canadian is richer than the average American, according to a report cited in Toronto's Globe and Mail.

And not just by a little. Currently, the average Canadian household is more than $40,000 richer than the average American household. The net worth of the average Canadian household in 2011 was $363,202, compared to around $320,000 for Americans.

[Check out our editorial cartoons on President Obama.]

If you're thinking the Canadian advantage must be due to exchange rates, think again. The Canadian dollar has actually caught up to the U.S. dollar in recent years.

"These are not 60-cent dollars, but Canadian dollars more or less at par with the U.S. greenback," Globe and Mail's Michael Adams writes.

To add insult to injury, not only are Canadians comparatively better-off than Americans, they're also more likely to be employed. The unemployment rate is 7.2 percent—and dropping—in Canada, while the U.S. is stuck with a stubbornly high rate of 8.2 percent.

Besides a strengthening currency and a better labor market, experts credit the particularly savage fallout from the financial crisis on the U.S. economy and housing market, which torpedoed home values and gutted household wealth. According to the report, real estate held by Canadians is worth more than $140,000 more on average and they have almost four times as much equity in their real estate investments.

[Read: Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg Refinances at 1.05 Percent.]

In a column for Bloomberg View, Stephen Marche traces the increasing wealth spread between the two countries to America's "struggles to find its way out of an intractable economic crisis and a political sine curve of hope and despair."

"The Canadian System is working," Marche writes, crediting Canada's cautious, fiscally conservative society. "[T]he American system is not."

But there is one caveat that could give the U.S. an ego boost: the average American holds more liquid[..]ets—cash in hand—than the average Canadian.


For the First Time, Canadians Now Richer Than Americans - US News and World Report

lets keep outsourcing !! our politicians we all kno they are puppets.

[pic] lets keep buying chinese made products, !! your job.

that is the main problem, Americans wanna be patriotic, except they like buying cheap[..] hell Chinese goods.

most Americans don't know !! aboot economics

lol@aboot. Nobody pronounces it like that up here. Still, can never understand where that came from

South Park? [pic]

Hope you all are buying gold & silver coin....

[pic]


What's them marijuana laws like over there? I used to live in WA and would visit Canada all the time. Loved it up there. Weather is on point (I love snow) and the people are nice.

Wait, do you smoke weed, ronnie?

I really need to take a trip there.

Americon...with.....the..........L

Fixed

they have a different way of saying words with "ou" in it. Some parts it does actually sound like "aboot" but south park just exaggerated it and it was funny as hell so it caught on

Makes me wish i had married a canadian woman.

Every time i traded in coins I tossed the Canadian coins and didn't care where I put em, I save them boys now.

my boy Jerrad from Calgary says aboot. never heard it before till i met him and his strange family.


poor guys a Flames fan[pic]

'bout time .. [pic]


[pic]

eeeeehhhhhhhhhhhh


fuccin mounties