International Investing

The Economist puts up the sentence (headline) and the chart of the day in this article on housing prices.

Unfortunately, new figures this week reveal that house prices have already fallen by more over the past 12 months than in any year during the Great Depression. The S&P/Case-Shiller national index fell by 14.1% in the year to the first quarter. Admittedly, other property indices show smaller drops, but most economists now favour this measure. The index goes back only 20 years, but Robert Shiller, an economist at Yale University and co-inventor of the index, has compiled a version that stretches back more than a century. This shows that the latest fall in nominal prices is already much bigger than the 10.5% drop in 1932, at the worst point of the Depression.