@retired juggie, I tend to agree with you for the most part and was merely using LB and WM as examples of corporate failures in similar businesses. The fact that my family have over 25% of our net worth tied up in four of the five Canadian big bank stocks attests to my faith in their operations no matter how aggressive their sales tactics.

I'll just defend my other post by saying Lehman may not have been a mortgage originator but it collapsed as a direct result of investing in mortgage debt instruments as did Bear Stearns. WaMu suffered a run on the bank due to it's shaky mortgage business. There are direct parallels to our Big 5, residential mortgages passed the $1 Trillion mark in Canada last year and make up the single largest portion of all the banks' businesses. The difference here however, is that CMHC backstops high-ratio mortgages and OSFI regulation essentially keeps the Schedule 1 banks out of the sub-prime market making credit risk considerably lower than the US experience.