Average Canadians Households Now Worth More than Average U.S. Households

Mark this down as an accom­plish­ment no one every expected to see hap­pen under any U.S. President.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to the Obama Admin­is­tra­tion, you offi­cially suck.

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.

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.

Experts also point to one other thing help­ing Canada — a fis­cally con­ser­v­a­tive gov­ern­ment with lim­ited pub­lic debt.  We don’t have that here, now do we?

But buck up Amer­ica, appar­ently we have more liq­uid assets (cash) than our neigh­bors to the north.  I guess we can hang our hats on that while we eco­nom­i­cally cir­cle the drain.

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