What the US housing market needs is more buyers. So the government has conspired to produce such optimistic beings by pushing mortgage rates below 5 per cent, and offering first-time buyers a tax credit (soon to expire). And house prices have – on the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller measure at least – very slightly rebounded, while applications for loans to finance house purchases have been on an upward trend since February. The problem, however, is that the US needs more jobs.

Simply halting the rise in unemployment seems unlikely to produce more activity. With a similar sized workforce of 135m people in the year 2000 there were 5.2m existing home sales. On a seasonally adjusted basis, transactions hit that rate in July this year, and were running at a 5.1m annual pace in August, according to the National Association of Realtors. From an all-time peak of 69 per cent in 2005 (when 7.1m homes were sold), rates of owner occupation are almost back to the 67 per cent typical a decade ago. Assuming no return to the mania of the boom, job formation is needed to spur demand.