But others pointed to low or even negative savings rates coupled with a growing current account deficit as unsustainable imbalances. In the introduction to our Annual Report in 1998, we wrote that it was clear that at some point a correction had to happen but that it was hard to predict its trigger and its timing.
4 In the event, the boom ended in coincidence with a tightening of monetary policy and was followed by a recession, with price changes in the United States approaching deflation in the early 2000s. (4)  The boom in the Dutch housing market in the 1990s. In some respects, the housing market boom of the 1990s resembled the bubble of the mid1970s.