Fears of easy money have pushed the world’s interlinked property markets to the same frothy extremes seen before the Lehman crisis in 2008, posing a mounting risk to economic and social stability.
The International Monetary Fund warns that houses have increasingly become a commodity like any other, exploited by global investors in the relentless hunt for high-yielding assets.
Property markets have taken on an international character, driven by forces beyond the full control of any one country. A house price crash in any one region can spread by contagion through a nexus of spillover effects.
