As Mr Mason points out, there is no industry standard for modifying terms and it is not clear how well it will work, particularly at a time when house prices are falling.

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And, given the scale of excess supply, house prices particularly in hard hit areas are likely to overshoot.

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Through much of the 2000 campaign for the White House, particularly in the early primary season when home heating oil prices were rising steadily in the Northeast, Bush blasted the Clinton administration for not "jawboning" members of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries to increase production.

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Indeed, as in Britain, the rise in house prices has contributed significantly to the strength of consumer spending, particularly on furnishings and the like.

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In just a few chapters, he outlines the forces that brought the world to the brink of a bust: a house-price bubble boosted by runaway mortgage lending in the rich world, particularly America, a lightly regulated global financial system that found ever-more creative ways to speculate on rising house prices, and macroeconomic policymaking that was far too laid back about the dangers posed by asset-price bubbles.

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