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The Globe and Mail’s latest claim to have uncovered a Vancouver real-estate scandal managed not only to create the usual policy flaps within B.C.’s snake pit of coiled housing regulators, it also dragged out an all-too-familiar explanation for rising housing prices in the city. Under a headline that claimed “Flipping of condo units by insiders fuels hot Vancouver market,” the Globe this week reported that Vancouver condo speculators were “sucking up supply, further driving up prices.”

Sucking up supply? Maybe the flipping speculators were vacuuming up Vancouver condos and shipping them off to China. Or perhaps the condos were moved to a special speculators’ underground industrial holding tank under the False Creek Flats.

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Blaming speculators is a standard bit of pop economics that gets recycled whenever the price of something — from oil to coffee to housing — goes up more than people would like or think it should. Generally, however, the conclusion that speculators are driving up prices is a reversal of actual cause and effect, which is that speculators are in the market because prices are going up. And the reason prices are going up has nothing to do with speculators or — as the Globe claimed — condo “flippers.”