Who would have thought this time last year, that a decline of 4.2% would put Italy near the bottom of the global league table. Not very many people I shouldn’t imagine, but this is the reality in which we now live.
The truth is that the massive stimulus of economies and housing markets around the world has led to the crisis reaching nowhere near the depths that many people feared.
There are now several countries at the top of the table, with double digit growth, the China’s the Hong Kong’s and the Australia’s. In these cases the stimulus was far more than was needed, as the economies never suffered as badly as had been feared. A liquidity surge has caused massive growth in prices.
Meanwhile Italy’s performance has been based primarily on the stability in the housing markets, and the government’s controls over speculation. Italy has offered very little in the way of stimulating the housing market, other than the policies handed down from the European Central Bank, which slashed its key interest rate early in the crisis.
In some ways that makes Italy’s decline of 4.2% over the year more impressive than the double digit growth. If not more impressive then certainly more favourable. To explain: whereas now the country’s at the top of the table must work out how to cool the market, and/or how to come out of stimulus without causing a second crash, Italy can concentrate on returning to its former path of solid, stable growth.
Source: http://www.property-abroad.com
