Beginning in mid-2007, the worldwide monetary emergency immediately transformed from the bursting of the housing bubble rise in the US to the most noticeably awful recession the world has seen for more than six decades. Through a top to bottom survey of the emergency regarding the causes,...

This paper examines the house price boom that occurred simultaneously in the United States and in a number of European countries in 2003 to 2007. In the United States, Spain, Ireland, the UK, the Netherlands, and Denmark, a house price boom peaked in 2007 and, in each case, was accompanied by a...

Housing finance, and, specifically, the subprime private label securitisation market in the US, was at the epicentre of the global financial crisis. Excessive debt expansion in the run-up to the crisis resulted in credit risk, under-identified and mispriced ex ante, and in systemic risk. This...

The recent Great Recession has renewed interest in the role of financial markets and credit in the economy, as well as in the boundaries of monetary, macroprudential and fiscal policies that impact macroeconomic developments and may influence business cycles. In the first two chapters of this...

This paper provides a systematic empirical analysis of the role of the housing market in the macroeconomy in the U.S. and the euro area. First, it establishes some stylised facts concerning key variables in the housing market on the two sides of the Atlantic, such as real house prices,...