This week Ben Bernanke, the Fed's new chairman, warned community banks about their commercial-property lending.
For another, many banks' consumer and commercial-property lending businesses have been affected by the slowdown.
But the deal went sour once the extent of one partner's over-optimistic property lending in eastern Germany came out.
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Property lending doubled in 2006, partly because of lower interest rates and partly because arcane rule changes made it safer.
During the last quarter, NAB took over Clydesdale's commercial real estate portfolio as it seeks an exit from commercial property lending.
Figures from the Bank of England show that bank lending to business, except for property lending, fell in the last nine months of 2009.
They included the loss of 1, 400 jobs, an exit from commercial property lending and a scaling down of its business operations, mainly in England.
Philippine banks officially have only 11% of their assets in property, but it is thought that, as in Thailand, property lending has been seriously under-reported.
He believes that the central bank's new credit guidelines, which include a limit on property lending to one-fifth of outstanding loans, would bring stability in the long run.
And what of the Spanish government's supposedly bold plan to inject 19bn euros of new capital into Bankia, the country's largest pure retail bank, laid low by reckless property lending?
Indeed, today's loans to telecoms firms may turn out to be much like property lending a decade ago, a fad that caused economic downturn and, for a while, stopped the bull market in its tracks.
Because of an economic downturn in the UK described by NAB's chief executive Cameron Clyne as "longer and slower to recover than experienced in the 1930s following the Great Depression", the bank has decided to cut 1, 400 UK jobs, pull out of commercial property lending here and concentrate on retail and small business banking.
They also employ algorithms to determine the fair value of each listed property, lending some rigor to a once-inexact science.
These banks have a high share of mortgage lending and are heavily exposed to commercial property and construction lending - which is what has done for them, because Spain's housing market is weak and becoming weaker, and its commercial property sector is a basket case.
These cycles are self-reinforcing: more lending pushes up property prices, which encourages more lending.
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Tighter credit policies on property and equity lending announced by the central bank March 28 threaten to throttle earnings growth in the short-term.
Despite administrative ceilings imposed in March on lending for property development or purchases of shares, credit keeps climbing.
Meanwhile, the decline in interest rates has been a great boon for commercial property, a core lending business for community banks.
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Residential lending and property development loans account for 14% of all loans.
Many believe that Spain's banks have still not owned up to the full scale of the losses they face on reckless lending to property developers and businesses.
As a result, many businesses that would otherwise survive this downturn are at risk of defaulting, which in turn will lead to even lower property values and less lending, not to mention lost jobs.
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New and existing home sales are up, as are homeownership, home builder confidence and prices, but most new households are renters, since new potential buyers are kept out of the property market by tight lending standards, uncertain employment and crushing student debts.
"The banks became very overextended, not just in lending on property, which we all know about, but in this case, for example, buying businesses in Mexico about which, it turned out, they knew too little, " Sir John Gieve, former deputy governor of the Bank of England told the BBC.
Banks in the United Arab Emirates are tiptoeing back into real-estate lending as the property market shows signs of stability.
As in Bangkok, many small and undercapitalised financial institutions have over-extended themselves in lending to a property market which has gone soggy.
Like the DCLG survey, the surveys are based only on property sales financed by mortgage lending, ignoring sales which are sold for cash.
Banks, awash in bad debt, are to be encouraged to start lending again to property and construction projects, and the central bank will be less strict in classifying bad loans.
Property values have fallen and lending has dropped.
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It turns out that Clydesdale, which includes Yorkshire Bank, was far from prudent in its lending on commercial property, jumping on the Bank of Scotland bandwagon three or so years before it all went horribly wrong.
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