The first group, including the United Kingdom (Chart 2.1), Spain (Chart 2.2), and Ireland (Chart 2.3), had a similar experience to that of the United States and Japan. The second group, including Germany (Chart 3.1) and France (Chart 3.2), tells a different story: their working population ratio, property prices, and real loans peaked at different times.
And it is the first group, in Chart 2, which suffered property bubbles triggering financial distress, most severely in Ireland and Spain, and to a lesser extent in the United Kingdom. What lessons can we learn from this rather cursory examination of recent history?