A good article in the Sunday Times yesterday
www.timesonline.co.uk/new..._1,00.html
For those who hate links the gist is that for a decade world house prices have soared, creating the biggest boom in history.
In three years house prices have rocketed in South Africa by 95%, in China by 68%, in Australia by 56% and in America and Thailand by 29%. In Britain they rose 50%. The world has never seen a boom of such breadth and scale.
To doubters — who are predicting prices will fall by 20% or more in many countries — it is the gigantic bubble that swallowed the world, bigger than the stock market boom of the 1990s and almost twice the size of the Wall Street bubble of the roaring 1920s.
So how will it end?
For the optimists - it will be stagnation so long as interest rates don’t rise sharply and we don’t go into recession.
For the pessimists - well my inner private fraser says we are all doomed, doomed.
www.timesonline.co.uk/new..._1,00.html
For those who hate links the gist is that for a decade world house prices have soared, creating the biggest boom in history.
In three years house prices have rocketed in South Africa by 95%, in China by 68%, in Australia by 56% and in America and Thailand by 29%. In Britain they rose 50%. The world has never seen a boom of such breadth and scale.
To doubters — who are predicting prices will fall by 20% or more in many countries — it is the gigantic bubble that swallowed the world, bigger than the stock market boom of the 1990s and almost twice the size of the Wall Street bubble of the roaring 1920s.
So how will it end?
For the optimists - it will be stagnation so long as interest rates don’t rise sharply and we don’t go into recession.
For the pessimists - well my inner private fraser says we are all doomed, doomed.
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