Andrew Bell

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“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today”— Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty on being informed HMS Princess Royal had blown up soon after the loss of HMS Queen Mary

On this day in 1916, the Battle of Jutland came to an end, marking the biggest naval clash of the First World War. British losses were far heavier after it turned out that the Royal Navy's heavily armed, but lightly armoured, “battle cruisers” were vulnerable to shellfire. But Britain’s Grand Fleet won a strategic victory by continuing to keep the Germans’ High Seas Fleet bottled up in port.

Speaking of explosions, fears persist that Canada’s housing market is set for a destructive climax. The OECD, which has warned about frothy Canadian real estate before, is advising Ottawa “to reduce financial-stability risks from high household debt and house prices.”

BNN was joined this morning by chief economist Catherine Mann, who told us that excessive housing costs can make it harder for people to move, partially paralyzing the labour market.

Meanwhile, Bank of Montreal chief economist Douglas Porter has taken a shot at analysis by Toronto-Dominion Bank, which warned this week that would-be trade-up home buyers in Toronto and Vancouver face “buyer gridlock”  because of a shortage of supply, further lifting prices.

“National home sales hit an all-time high in April in seasonally adjusted terms,” the BMO economist writes. “If that’s what passes for a slower market, or gridlock, or whatever one wants to call it, it’s frightening to imagine what fast-moving traffic would look like.”

And at 10:05AM ET, we'll be joined by Peter Norman, chief economist at Altus Group, a provider of advice and data to the global commercial real estate industry. He said in his spring outlook that the federal government’s plan to settle 300,000 immigrants this year means the country will greet new arrivals at “the highest level in many decade. This should support housing demand, particularly in Ontario and Quebec, is past patterns are any guide.”

Some major investors are also worried about inflated valuations for global stocks. At 2:10PM ET, we’ll hear from Richard Turnill, the new global chief investment strategist for giant asset manager BlackRock, who warned late last month that “equities no longer look cheap.”

If you decide to dump your shares and go shopping instead, rest assured that more and more merchants are tracking your movements in stores. Our own Kristina Partsinevelos is live all day at Canada’s largest retail conference, STORE, where she’ll explore why shopkeepers are keen on surveillance. She’ll also talk to the 25-year-old founder of mobile ad company Kiip, who says traditional marketers are getting it wrong with their online ads.

Housing may or may not be in gridlock but the energy market is being roiled by the rise of renewable energy, which looks set to require a massive redesign of the century-old electricity grid. On Commodities at 11:50AM ET, we’ll get the take of Srinivasan Keshav, a professor at the University of Waterloo. He warns that the current system wastes vast amounts of power and requires the building of expensive generation equipment that is barely used. One solution: Learn from techniques that were used to build the Internet.

Obsolescence catches up with all of us eventually and vast fleets of battleships are no more. But the romance of majesty of the great ships remain. As Winston Churchill put it, describing the movement of the Navy to its war stations at the outbreak of war in 1914:

"We may now picture this great Fleet, with its flotillas and cruisers, steaming slowly out of Portland Harbour, squadron by squadron, scores of gigantic castles of steel wending their way across the misty, shining sea, like giants bowed in anxious thought. We may picture them again as darkness fell, 18 miles of warships running at high speed and in absolute blackness....The King’s ships were at sea."