Property agents in the US are busy bussing bargain-hunters around repossessed homes, but falling house prices are relatively novel for Americans. When Goldman Sachs examined 15 developed countries that have experienced house price crashes since the 1970s, it defined a crash as a fall of at least 15 per cent in real, inflation-adjusted, prices. By this definition, the US did not qualify. Among the 18 developed countries for which data exist, the only others to have escaped a house price crash since the 1970s were Denmark and Australia. The Netherlands and Finland experienced the steepest falls – about 50 per cent.

It could be argued that the UK has got off lightly in the past. It might not have felt like it, but both its previous housing-price busts were relatively short-lived at nearly four years in the mid-1970s, and just over three in the early 1990s. The average decline among the 15 countries lasted more than six years.