The bad news is that 2012 is the year of greatest risk that a bloated bank or over-extended government will be unable to repay its debts - because it is a year when a frightening volume of the loans that were taken out in the boom years fall due for repayment.
But a drop in real estate will no more cause consumer prices to fall than the real estate boom caused them to rise.
Banks have an incentive to lend as much as possible when property prices are rising, but then to pull out when prices fall, exacerbating both the boom and the bust.
They've performed very, very sluggishly, in fact a steep fall-off from the Internet boom to where we are now.
Thus, many schools saw applications fall during the late 1990s Internet boom when would be entrepreneurs preferred to launch straight into web start-ups.
Recognising that this would allow the economy to grow faster without fuelling inflation, Mr Greenspan allowed the boom to continue and unemployment to fall, dragging many disadvantaged workers back into the labour force.
As Europe's baby-boom generation retires, the population of working age will fall faster than in America, where it is still being replenished by immigration.
In Jordan, the Khaliji boom has more or less compensated for the 43% fall in European tourism during the confrontation with Iraq last February.
The urban boom also gives a clue to TB's rise and fall.
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Without a big property boom this time around, prices did not have so far to fall.
Microsoft also missed a sales boom of the small tablets that suddenly became popular with consumers last fall.
The generation in question is the one before the fertility fall really begins to bite, which in Europe and America was the baby-boom generation that is just retiring, and in China and East Asia the generation now reaching adulthood.
Stocks were tumbling last fall as the new school year began, but at Harvard University, it was as if the boom had never ended.
The previous boom brought double-digit growth and reckless lending, followed by a construction bust and a 14% fall in GDP.
It might not have mattered how Mason behaved while presiding over a company that had a meteoric rise in 2008 and an even more dramatic fall since then, a company that also has been used as an example of a second hype-fueled tech boom.
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