Another great post by Piggington. Apply it to you know where.
The bubble beneficiary sectors, so named because they grew like weeds as a result of the housing boom, are: construction, finance (which includes real estate transactions), and retail (not directly related to housing like the other two, but a bubble beneficiary nonetheless as a result of vigorous home equity-financed consumer spending). In the graphs below, I have grouped these three sectors together as the “Housing Bubble Sectors” and charted the change in their size alongside that of the non-bubble private sector industries and government.
Those excess jobs are gone for good, now that the bubble is no longer with us. They never should have existed to begin with. We would have been far better off if all the labor and resources that were squandered on the housing bubble were instead put to uses that could have generated a sustainable increase in society’s long-term prosperity. As a bonus, we would have avoided a big crash, too.
Of course, virtually ALL of the employment growth in Canada since the 2008 recession has been in the bubble beneficiary sectors.