Spain has what looks like a house-price bubble, and so does Britain and, arguably, Ireland.
Look only at Japan for a painful reminder of the implications of a burst asset-price bubble.
Whether or not the house-price bubble bursts this time around, the north-south house-price differential is already shrinking.
But when it comes to the biggest house-price bubble in history, theory does not get you very far.
There are three reasons why a house-price bubble might cause more harm on bursting than a stockmarket bubble.
Consumer spending could, however, weaken even if the house-price bubble does not burst.
The recession was caused not, as before, by inflation taking off, but by the bursting of an asset-price bubble.
All this makes it easy to see how a property-price bubble can develop.
Two causes we can all agree on: the bursting of the home price bubble and the collapse of spending by over-indebted consumers.
The Bank of Japan allowed deflation to develop when it held policy too tight, partly because it was worried about another asset-price bubble.
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For Mr Lindsey has made no secret of the fact that he considers the American economy to be suffering from an asset-price bubble.
When demand falters, or new supply shows up, the price bubble can evaporate as quickly as it arose, without a speculator in sight.
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But the Bank will be loth to repeat the mistake of the late 1980s, when too lax a monetary policy inflated a property-price bubble.
It must make sense for the central banks to be pre-emptive and prevent the asset price bubble, so as to prevent the nasty, subsequent hangover.
President Bush could help to once and for all pop the oil-price bubble by selling oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on a more regular basis.
Philip Rees, professor of population geography at Leeds University, says that during the last southern house-price bubble in the late 1980s, there was net immigration to the north.
Hence, a large current-account deficit that fuels consumption (as in Mexico in the early 1990s) or a property-price bubble (as in Thailand until last year) may be a problem.
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.
The government will rely more on public investment to boost growth and is less likely to cut interest rates further in the rest of 2012, to avoid a resurgence of a property price bubble.
The good news for Scotts, however, is that the company is dependent on people who want to keep their lawns looking decent or are growing a tomato garden, not on a worldwide agricultural price bubble.
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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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.
ECONOMIST: The higher they climb, the further they will fall
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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Thus, even without the tax deduction, low mortgage rates and years of post-bubble price declines have made buying much cheaper than renting.
Excuse the physics, but everything about uranium derives from this, including guessing whether the current hot commodity price is a bubble or a new floor.
If a lender tries to play it safe then she will still get screwed by the fact that any loan she makes will be to a buyer who is paying market price, which is bubble inflated.
He really laid out the problem quite well, at least, the problem of the last two or three years, that there was a speculative bubble in the price of housing, that the financial institutions, the banks and investment banks and all these insurance companies and pension funds and everyone else exacerbated that problem by spreading that risk all throughout the economy.
This bubble has not lifted the price of every business, with investors more discriminating in their enthusiasms.
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