There are three reasons why a house-price bubble might cause more harm on bursting than a stockmarket bubble.
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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Spain has what looks like a house-price bubble, and so does Britain and, arguably, Ireland.
Our reason for suspecting that a house-price bubble has developed in the six countries listed in the first paragraph is that in all of them house prices are close to record levels in relation to both rents and average incomes.
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In America, where we also identified a potential house-price bubble, the 12-month rate of growth in home prices slowed to 5.6% in the year to the second quarter, the slowest rate of increase since 1999.
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The entire firm came around to believing the great mortgage bubble was a house of cards ready to collapse, based on delinquencies, no-doc loans, fraud, and more.
We took a first look at New York City's gigantic, spiky blue smog-eating wendy pavilion, and at the Dwell on Design Show in LA this week we spotted the Casa Bubble House, a round, transparent pod made of recycled material that can be used like a tent.
Much of the weakness, particularly in Spain, is down to struggling firms in property and finance, which suggests that the credit crunch and the deflating house-price bubble are taking a broader toll.
In a coffee house in Ankawa, Erbil's Christian quarter, Barcelona fan Mustapha Ergushi puffs on a hubble-bubble as he muses on the explanation for this strange infatuation.
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Although there may be a bubble in luxury housing, especially in Shanghai, house prices nationwide rose by only 4% on average last year.
The first thing Ms. Bower saw when she visited the building was "the large white bubble" located on Second Avenue, a "muck house" used to store rock bored out for subway tunnels.
Presidents have been known to say that they feel stifled governing from the environs of the Rose Garden, meaning that they believe they have to get out from the bubble that is life in the White House if they want to maintain a feel for America and Americans.
New house investments as a percentage of GDP has fallen from a peak of 6.3% during the 2005 bubble to 2.4% this year.
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In the last great debt bubble in the U.S. that peaked in 1929, the average household could not afford a house and had to put down 50% and get a 5-year balloon mortgage.
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