Description
This is a follow up to the report on the “Bursting Housing Bubble”. In 2007, the property boom came to a grinding halt and booming house prices and sales are now a thing of the past, in Spain, the UK, Ireland and the USA. Developers, builders, estate agents, notaries, bankers, high officials in the European government and university professors discuss the real-estate crisis and the way it is sapping confidence in financial markets. To describe the new scenario, we returned to see how some of the people interviewed in the last report are coping. We also went to the United States to look at how it all started: subprime mortgages and investment products based on mortgages, in both Europe and the US. Getting a loan is now harder and money is not flowing as freely as it did a few years ago, and this is being keenly felt by those who need mortgages.