Learning From Canadian Banks

I love it when the rest of the world acknowledges how exceptional our Canadian banks have rather matter-of-factly tended to be. I never realized, when I worked for a bank all those years, that it was anything special compared to how things were done elsewhere. But then as the recent financial crisis turned into the big news story of 2007/08/09, I kept hearing about financial practices going on in the States and in Britain that I was pretty sure would never get off the drawing board here in the Great White North.

This Paul Krugman article, which in turn points to another, longer report, highlights not only our banking sector's robustness, but also how its recent health debunks so many of the self-serving theories in the U.S. as to what happened within their crazy house of cards. Canadian banks are a testament to regulation, for example, whereas some Americans try to say that regulation (rather than deregulation) was to blame for their meltdown. Granted, you won't have seen the big stock advances in TD, BMO or Royal Bank stock here that was prevalent for their American counterparts, but many of those "runaway successes" turned out to be illusions down south, anyway.