Judging from this Australian edition of 60 Minutes, Australia seems to be undergoing a massive housing boom, fueled, no doubt, by cheap money and lax credit standards, echoing the subprime crisis in the United States.
This has shown up in the charts, as pictured below. In a little over 12 years, house prices in Australia have massively outstripped inflation by 135 percentage points, from a base of 100.00 in the last quarter of 2002 to 268.59 in the third quarter of 2015. In the same time period, general consumer prices rose from a base of 100.00 to 133.0 as of the third quarter of 2015. The gap between Australian House Prices vs Inflation is one of the largest seen in recent history. Only Hong Kong has developed a higher gap in a slightly shorter time frame.
Given that the Australian Housing Bubble is beginning to pop, the country could experience massive declines in house prices, similar to what happened in the US. The US House Price Index peaked at 135.81 in the first quarter of 2007, then declined by over 20% to bottom out at 107.74 on the second quarter of 2011. This was almost 10 percentage points below inflation adjusted level of 117.39 at that time. Since then, US Housing prices have rebounded past inflation adjusted levels and the index is now at 134.27 as of the third quarter of 2015 while inflation adjusted levels remain at 125.60.
Sources: 60 Minutes Australia, Global Property Guide, www.worldbank.org, Trading Economics
No comments:
Post a Comment