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%.
The extraordinary development of the euro bond market and the recent opening of the Italian stock exchange to international alliances will also help a system that had lost the market for corporate bonds and where firms’ recourse to the equity market is still limited.