The US and the Eurozone are slowly recovering after the bursting of their huge housing bubbles. Yet the hardest-hit states in the US have adjusted more rapidly than the most troubled European economies. This column examines differences between the US and Eurozone monetary unions that can help explain why.

Spain faces high unemployment and slow growth. This column focuses on an important sources of those problems – its housing market. While some adjustment has occurred since Spain's housing bubble burst in 2008, house prices and construction need to decrease more to slow Spain's unsustainable accumulation of foreign debt.

Visit Ireland and Spain and you will find row upon row of empty houses – the remnants of a housing boom turned bust. Were low interest rates to blame? This column looks at the effect of a deviation in interest rates from the Taylor rule and finds that keeping interest rates ‘too low’ can explain up to 50% of the overvaluation of the property market in these countries and elsewhere.

This column presents empirical evidence identifying the factors triggering mortgage defaults in the US. Both deterioration of borrowers’ net equity and liquidity constraints have been important. Policy remedies will have to address both concerns – the authors recommend write-downs on loan principal amounts as one such measure.

Japan’s banking crisis of the late 1990s and early 2000s offer critical lessons on how to deal with the current financial crisis. This column warns against relying on fiscal stimulus, stresses the importance of recapitalising viable bank but letting the ‘zombie banks’ go bust to boost certainty about financial firms’ solvency. In order to avoid a vicious cycle of steady economic decline as in Japan, the G8 and emerging economies should create a "Financial System Stabilisation Fund".