My main point is that housing bubbles are not only highly adverse events, but they are common and similar. Nevertheless, too few policy makers have learned too little from the historical experience. Figure 1 shows annual property price indices in nominal terms from the BIS website for 10 countries, indexed so that 1999 equals 100.
The figure tells a familiar story: property prices rose sharply across the world in the decade before the financial crisis started in 2007. The diversity of the price changes between 1999 and 2007 is staggering, ranging from –6% in Germany to over 160% in Spain, which corresponds to an average annual increase of between –0.85 and 12%.