Thus, policy makers have to perform a subtle balancing act between long-run crisis prevention and immediate crisis response. 3. Property price indexes as the foundation of policy  Let me now turn to the issue of data and statistics as the foundation of policy.
Unfortunately, the current state of our knowledge about property markets is still limited, especially in constructing property price indexes that are reliable (R), accurate (A), timely (T), and easy (E) to understand – what I call the “RATE” requirement. Thus, property prices were identified at the November 2009 G20 Meeting as one of the crucial data gap issues.