There is much debate about what constitutes a housing crash, but the consensus seems to be a fall in property prices of about 15 to 20 per cent. A research briefing by the consultancy Oxford Economics defines it as a 10 per cent peak-to-trough fall in prices. By that metric, much of the world’s property markets have already crashed — and still have a way to go. “I think we have been in a bubble, and I think we are now in the process of that bubble correcting significantly in some economies,” says Adam Slater, the lead economist at Oxford Economics.
In January, Jeremy Grantham, a co-founder of GMO, an asset manager based in Boston, who correctly warned of the 2007 US housing bubble,
