For owner-occupiers, perceptions of affordability will depend on many things including price, household income, the cost and availability of finance, and a host of factors affecting the needs and aspirations of the buyer. In any analysis it is necessary to make use of summary measures, while acknowledging that these inevitably gloss over the diversity of experience across different types of households.
The single currency is acting as a powerful device to reinforce surveillance, coordination and the peer review process in an institutional setting where economic policy decisions remain to a very large extent in the national domain. This makes Europe a natural laboratory for experimenting solutions that can be of use at the global level as well. BIS central bankers’ speeches  3