David McWilliams deflates our wealth illusion, with a salutary comparison with the property bubble in Japan,
A good example was the fact that in 1988 the land on which the Imperial Palace in central Tokyo sits was valued at more than the entire real estate of the State of California or Canada – the world’s second largest country. By that benchmark, Japan was indeed the wealthiest country in the world. Needless to say, it was all nonsense – not because the Japanese were not wealthy, they were; but the property bubble (which burst in 1990 with dire consequences) had overstated that wealth enormously. The Japanese had income which had been built up over generations from making stuff, but they were not as wealthy as they thought they were.
David goes on to state that when the bubble burst at least the Japanese had a wealth creation industry (manfacturing) to fall back on, what will we do when the so called softlanding catapults us out of our seats and into the aeroplane bulkhead?
Copacetic 
So what are you doing buying a new house then? You better hope that software business takes off! 😉
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Paul,
Buying a new house is not the problem, thats just debt exchange, the real danger for irish people is those people who get a mortgage, wait for the value to go up, then leverage that mortgage via an interest only mortgage to purchase a second property. Then repeat that two or three more times. They are now heavily leveraged against a rising property market. If (when?) the bubble bursts, they will dump their property faster that a rose of tralee escort drops a loosing partner. Unfortunately so will everybody else in the same situation, and as it takes at least two months to sell a property they will never catch up with a falling market and will watch close after close fail to happen as the market drops.
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