据《纽约时报》6月13日报道，美国加州的房价自从1997年以来已经上涨了130％，如今已是两倍于美国平均水平。而最近一段时间里，房屋价格的强劲上升不仅仅是某一地区和某一国家的特性，已经成为世界范围的普遍现象。

   
比起西班牙、法国、英国、瑞典或澳大利亚，美国最近几年的房价攀升幅度实在是小巫见大巫。如今百万美元的两居室已经不再是纽约等地区特有的现象，伦敦、巴黎乃至中国香港这种骇人听闻的高价房屋已经比比皆是。在新西兰，2003年到2004年，房屋价格增长了16％，在爱尔兰这个数字为10％。

   
国际房屋市场爆炸是全球化趋势的副产物，而这也最终导致了可怕的房价整体飙升。如今房屋已经成为了最有价值的不动产，且金融市场也正在变得越来越开放和国际化，彼此连接的金融机构使得人们更加容易从银行贷款去购买房屋。

   
报道分析认为，全球房屋价格的增长并不是自然形成的，世界范围的中央银行亲手导演了这次演出，而美联储更是首当其冲。在面临股票市场的整体下滑，以及高科技泡沫的破灭之后，美联储在2000年大幅度降低了利率，以此来降低美国经济和贸易伙伴的损失。与此同时，其他一些中央银行，例如欧洲中央银行立刻跟上了美联储的脚步。更高的政府开支和税收降低也是计划的一部分。

   
信用贷款利息的降低进一步促进了房屋市场的发展，因为这使得用户在分期付款的过程中可以花费更少的资金。购房者通过低利息率节省了大笔的房屋按揭费用，这笔节省下来的资金被投入到了消费者开支领域。那些价格攀升房屋的购买者把住房再融资贷款取出来，花费在汽车、衣服、家具、餐饮旅游业等行业。因此，房屋价格的攀升最终也促进了其他消费者开支，从而为全球经济的良性循环创造了条件。雷曼兄弟伦敦公司的全球首席经济学家约翰·列维尔恩说：“美联储和其他中央银行鼓励房屋市场的发展，因此股票市场的财富损失被转换为了房屋，房屋市场的大爆炸也促进了全球其他产品的需求。”

   
在此次全球化房屋市场大爆炸中，一些被经济学家称为“主要城市”的地区是热门中的热门。这些地区或者是商务中心，或者是文化圣地，例如英国伦敦、法国巴黎、美国波士顿和迈阿密、中国上海、澳大利亚悉尼等。当然，这些地区都是一些国际化的大都市，其中沿海城市和旅游中心居多。正是这些沿海城市首先带动了房屋价格的攀升。

   
对于政策制订者来说，房屋市场促进整体经济发展的计划到目前为止十分成功，不过价格的攀升不可能持续很长的时间。英国莱丁大学不动产经济学家米歇尔·贝尔说：“欧洲的大多数国家与美国一样都正在经历房屋价格的大幅攀升，不过这种攀升即将到达顶点，它不能在继续下去了。”

   
政府最为可能的治理方式就是有节制地提高利息率，降低房屋价格的攀升速度，同时鼓励人们将更多的资金用于储蓄。实际上如今包括美联储在内的世界多家中央银行已经开始采取此种政策。不过在欧洲境内，仍然有一些国家选择继续降低利率鼓励房屋市场的发展。不过这种鼓励很大程度上源于国家经济增长速度的驰援，例如在德国，房屋价格还没有达到一个很高的水平，且国内经济增长速度也比西班牙等国低了许多，因此政府仍然需要利用房屋市场来刺激整体经济增长。

    （ 李远）

    The housing market in California may
look like a textbook case of superheated "irrational exuberance," but
then how does one explain Spain?

    Home prices there have risen 130
percent since 1997, twice as much as in the United States.

    These days, house-price vertigo is more
than a local or national condition. It's a worldwide phenomenon.

    The American housing boom in recent
years is nothing compared with the price run in countries like France, Spain,
Britain, Ireland, Sweden and Australia, even though markets in Australia and
Britain have cooled in the past year.

    Million-dollar two-bedroom apartments
are not only a fixture of New York but also of London, Paris and Hong Kong. In
New Zealand, housing prices rose more than 16 percent from 2003 to 2004.

    In Ireland, they rose more than 10
percent in that period.

    The rise in prices is worrisome because
the international housing boom is a byproduct of globalization. A house on a
plot of ground is the most local of assets. But the financial markets that make
it possible for people to borrow money to buy a house, or speculate, are
increasingly open, international and linked.

    Interest rate policies in the
industrialized world tend to move in lockstep, usually led by the United States.
A growing community of affluent professionals around the world now buy second
homes and invest in housing abroad.

    The economic links act as a
self-reinforcing network that has fueled the global surge in house prices but
would also be likely to magnify the pain on the way down. The ripples would
extend well beyond the housing markets. A fall in American house prices, for
example, would crimp consumer spending - and free-spending Americans have
supported growth in many export-minded nations, notably China.

    "The real concern is that the
housing boom extends across so many countries this time," said Susan
Wachter, a professor of real estate at the Wharton School of the University of
Pennsylvania. "That just raises the stakes, and the risk, when the music
stops."

    The global surge in house prices is a
boom by design, largely manufactured by the world's central banks, led by the
Federal Reserve. And it was done for good reason. Faced with a falling stock
market and the collapse of the high-technology bubble, the Fed cut interest
rates sharply in 2000 to try to limit the damage to the U.S. economy and its
trading partners.

    Other central banks, like the European
Central Bank, quickly followed the Fed's lead. Higher government spending and
tax cuts were also part of the formula.

    Cheap credit worldwide fueled the
housing market, making mortgage payments less costly. Homeowners refinanced
their mortgages at lower rates, and the savings went into consumer spending.
They took out home equity loans on houses of rising value, spending that
borrowed money on cars, clothes, furniture, restaurant meals and vacations. The
higher consumer spending and the soaring value of the home nest egg have kept
the global economy chugging along.

    "The Fed and other central banks
encouraged this boom so that the wealth lost in the stock market was replaced by
housing," said John Llewellyn, the global chief economist at Lehman
Brothers in London. "And the housing boom has stimulated demand around the
world."

    The biggest globalization lift in house
prices has been in what urban economists call "primate cities." These
are the places where the world's well-off want to live or visit regularly for
business or cultural events, like London, Paris, New York, Boston, Shanghai, San
Francisco, Miami, Sydney and Vancouver. They are the most cosmopolitan of
locales, often coastal cities and tourist hubs. They experienced the largest
spikes in housing prices and pull up the national averages, while inland cities
lag behind- the tourist coast of Spain outpaces Madrid; San Francisco outdoes
Milwaukee.

    Hitching the world economy to the
housing market has worked well for policy makers so far. But it probably cannot
continue. Prices in general are continuing to rise both in the United States and
abroad as speculative buying and interest-only mortgages are proliferating.

    "Much of Europe is like the United
States, with roaring increases in housing prices," said Michael Bell, a
real estate economist at the University of Reading in England. "The boom
must be peaking soon. It just can't keep going up."

    The looming, unanswered question for
the global economy is whether the housing boom will cool down in an orderly way
over the next few years or end in a bust. The preferred path would be for
interest rates to rise steadily but moderately, slowing the pace of house price
increases and forcing consumers to save more. This is what the Federal Reserve
and some other central banks, like the Bank of England and the Reserve Bank of
Australia, have tried to do.

    But the European Central Bank is
contemplating lowering, not raising, interest rates. It is more concerned with
slow economic growth, especially in large economies like Germany's - where
housing prices are not skyrocketing - than smaller, hot economies like Spain's.