If the United States had never experienced such a housing bubble before, however, other countries had—and results had been uniformly disastrous. Shiller, studying data going back hundreds of years in countries from the Netherlands to Norway, found that as real estate grew to unaffordable levels a crash almost inevitably followed.54 The infamous Japanese real estate bubble of the early 1990s forms a particularly eerie precedent to the recent U.S. housing bubble, for instance. The price of commercial real estate in Japan increased by about 76 percent over the ten-year period between 1981 and
...more
