问答题 These days, house price vertigo is more than a local or national condition. It's a worldwide phenomenon.
(46)The American housing boom in recent years is nothing compared with the price run- up in countries like France, Spain, Britain, Ireland, Sweden and Australia, even though markets in Australia and Britain have cooled in the last year.
Million-dollar two-bedroom apartments are not only a fixture of New York, but of London, Paris and Hong Kong. In New Zealand, housing prices rose by more than 16 percent from 2003 to 2004. In Ireland, they rose more than 10 percent in that period.
The rise in prices is worrisome, because the international housing boom is a byproduct of globalization. A house on a plot of ground is the most local of assets. (47)But the financial markets that make it possible for people to borrow money to buy a house, or speculate, are increasingly open, international and linked.
Interest rate policies in the industrialized world tend to move in lockstep, usually led by the United States. t growing community of affluent professionals around the world now buy second homes and invest in housing abroad.
(48)The economic links act as a self-reinforcing network that has fueled the global surge in house prices but would also likely magnify the pain on the way down. The ripples would extend well beyond the housing markets. A fall in American house prices, for example, would crimp consumer spending--and free-spending Americans have supported growth in many export-minded nations, notably China.
(49) "The real concern is that the housing boom extends across so many countries this time," said Susan M. Wachter, a professor of real estate at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. "That just raises the stakes, and the risk, when the music stops. "
The global surge in house prices is a boom by design, largely manufactured by the world's central banks, led by the Federal Reserve. And it was done for good reason..(50)Faced with a falling stock market and the collapse of the high-tech bubble, the Fed cut interest rates sharply in 2000 to try to limit the damage to the American economy and its trading partners.
Other central banks, like the European Central Bank, quickly followed the Fed's lead. Higher government spending and tax cuts were also part of the formula.
Cheap credit worldwide fueled the housing market, making mortgage payments less costly. Homeowners refinanced their mortgages at lower rates, and the savings went into consumer spending. They took out home-equity loans on houses of rising value, and spent that borrowed money on cars, clothes, furniture, restaurant meals and vacations. The higher consumer spending and the soaring value of the home nest-egg have kept the global economy chugging along.