This was all fine as long as the value of the properties continued to soar, but then came the inevitable bust; house prices plummeted from 2008 onward, leaving many with negative equity. Today, just about the only people in Denmark who are solvent are the pensioners who paid off their mortgages before the interest-free loans were introduced; the massively indebted thirty- to forty-year-olds are, I believe the correct economic term is, “screwed,” not least because the Danes’ productivity has never come even remotely close to keeping up with their spending.
