House prices all over the world, BIS edition (3 graphs, one showing a West-German bubble)
Today, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) published a new and improved edition of their international house and land prices database. That’s a great thing and shows the progress of the science of economics! We need those prices to describe as well as to analyse our economies:
1) By far the larger part of household debt consists of mortgage debt, which means that house prices are indispensable for the analysis of as well net wealth of households as well as household behaviour. And, as mortgage debt is the single most important kind of ‘real economy’ asset on the balance sheets of banks the same holds for banks.
2) As (a) house prices have (at least up to 2008) increased in many countries while (b)at least up to 2008 house ownership also increased in many countries, the importance of the value of houses has increased. Of course after 2008 house prices decreased again in many countries but mortgage debts didn’t (or only barely) while on top of this price decrease the liquidity of houses also sharply decreased, as in many areas, like London, the amount of houses sold is despite recent price increases still only half the pre-2008 amount!). This means that households not only have become poorer but also less liquid (though it is, at least in my mind, somehow not too smart to mark your house to the market when you don’t intent to sell it!).
3) And am I wrong when I get the idea that houses and especially houses in capitals have become more important as an international asset of the plutocracy?
An international database of house prices enables analysis of questions like the above. To show the kind of data assembled by the BIS 3 graphs. Yes, the Norwegian one starts in 1819 (graph 1). Yes, Beijing has a bubble (graph 2). And yes, land prices in Germany move more pro-cyclical than house prices and (West) Germany knows a bubble, too, at the moment (graph 3). Oh, and Norway too might have a bubble, at the moment.
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
This is quite interesting, but I don’t know whether data not deflated by the CPI or some other measure for the value of money tells us very much.
Agree, but my point was to point out the existence of this database. Even then, however, the German land prices show unsustainable increases…
Classic feudal-like land tenure pricing effects from runaway fractional reserve banking and tax policies that favor land rents and unproductive, no-velocity rentier speculation and accumulation at the expense of labor and production.
The typical historical outcome was the worsening of conditions for the masses and the resulting economic and social instability, breakdown, revolt by merchants, intellectuals, or warriors against the untouchable, unaccountable, disinterested, contemptuous oligarchs and ruling elites, and epochal “regime change”.
But the oligarchic/ministerial or buffer caste between the elites and the masses had to first experience fear of loss of socioeconomic well-being and status and challenge the ruling elites above.
Today, the professional middle-class doctors, lawyers, engineers, professors, CPAs, and mid-level corporate executives and public administrators, for example, still maintain their self-identification and shared rentier values (reflected by the tick-by-tick obsession with equity index prices worldwide) and preference for a financialized economy and society with the wealthy ministerial intellectuals such as Krugman, et al., as well as the rentier-oligarch bankers and CEOs who enjoy their positions at the pleasure of the top 0.01-0.1% unseen owners of controlling financial interests of the Fortune 25-300 firms, including the TBTE banks that own the Fed and the US gov’t.
The rentier Power Elite top 0.01-0.1% and their oligarchs are predictably acting in such a way to price, via EXTREME wealth and income concentration and accumulation, the rest of humanity out of existence in time, prompting the requirement for the rise of reactionary police-state security institutions to protect the elites from the equally predictable mass-social reaction to worsening financial and economic conditions by the bottom 90-99%.
When you walk down most streets in America today it may not seem like a Great Depression is upon us, but there is no escaping the reality that the fundamental social and economic conditions throughout the world today actually have more catalyzing force to trigger a global economic crash than the conditions that triggered the Great Depression that began in 1929. Major market collapses are rarely perceived as obvious trends when we are living through them. Not until years after the event when historians impassively summarize the speed and magnitude of a crash are we able to clearly see the trends. This is because historians are compelled to conceptually compress all the discrete events that comprise the “crashing process” into a singular “crash” so that the events and accompanying lessons can be more easily understood by our posterity.
Ziad K Abdelnour