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You may not have paused to figure it out yet, but you could be one of tens of thousands of Canadians who can brag about securing cheap asset-backed credit and benefiting as the financial world melted down over the past year or so. Not only that, you probably also speculated successfully on a falling U.S. dollar.

How did you do it? Some time over the past few years, you leased a car or truck, and the financing arm of a big automaker gave you credit on terms unprecedented in modern history. Since then, the value of the asset they rented to you has plunged faster than car keys falling to the floor.

Why did they offer you such generous terms? Canadian consumer advocates have been grousing for years about new-car sticker prices that are higher here than in the U.S. The rise of the loonie in recent years has made those sticker prices look even more excessive. The automakers, in turn, offered Canadians supercheap financing on the overpriced new cars. Bad idea for them. Why?

A lease is really just a long-term rental if you return the car at the end of it. The interest rate on the lease is a carrot--the variable the automakers could play with to set your monthly payment.

At the end--say, after three or four years--the automaker offers to sell you the car for a residual value set in your contract. To make money, they have to accurately forecast what the market price of that asset will be, whether they get that price from you or some other buyer.

In recent years, the automakers were pretty good at forecasting how much giving you cheap money would cost them over the life of the lease. But they goofed badly in forecasting residual values.

The automakers were also blindsided by the surge in the value of the Canadian dollar. They can keep new vehicle prices higher in Canada than in the U.S. But used car prices here tend to move toward those in the giant market south of the border, factoring in exchange rates. So, if the loonie rises in value, used cars get cheaper for us.

I'm a big winner from all of this. I leased a nice car in 2005. It was a demo, and an unpopular model, so the price was discounted right away. The dealer also offered me a three-year lease at an annual rate of 0.3%. To me, that looked like almost no interest. The residual was pegged at 55% of the car's original value.

A few weeks back, the dealer phoned and asked if I wanted to buy the car for that 55%. I checked around and found the same model selling in the wholesale market at about 38%. No thanks.

After I added up the discounts, incentives and the miscalculation of future value, I figured that they cost the company about $30,000 on my car. No wonder that the automakers are sucking wind, and that Detroit's Big Three are fleeing the leasing business.

The trouble is that they still have a lot of leases on their books. GMAC, the now partially severed finance arm of General Motors, has billions of dollars worth of car leases in Canada. It used to be easy for automakers to finance those leases by issuing commercial paper. But one-year GMAC paper has been trading on financial markets at a steep 15% yield to maturity--investors are nervous about it.

The leases will soon turn into cars returned by customers. Over the next three years, in Canada alone, the automakers will get back about one million cars, SUVs and trucks, many worth 20% to 30% less than they forecast. David Powell, CEO of the Canadian Finance & Leasing Association, which represents 250 financial institutions involved in vehicle and equipment leasing, says Canadian used vehicles were shipped to the U.S. when the greenback was high. Now, with the strong loonie, cars are flowing the other way.

Few Canadians got the no-money-down mortgages available to Americans to buy houses in recent years. But we got the benefit of asset-backed financing through aggressive car leases. According to J.D. Power and Associates, a market research firm, this past January, 45% of Canadian customers leased their vehicles, versus just 22% in the U.S. But the automakers started tightening up this spring, and pretty much turned off the cheapo lease taps in July. Since then, the proportion of vehicles leased has dropped below 20% in both countries.

What should you do now? With a tidal wave of cheap cars coming, car prices will fall. Dealers may have to offer 0% financing to get you to buy. One or more of the Big Three might go under or merge--not because of the quality of their cars, but because they got greedy and figured that they knew more about the future value of a car than the market did.

Doug Steiner has a real job in the financial services industry in downtown Toronto. He can be reached at dsteiner@globeandmail.com