A trader-friend who lives in Illinois USA sent me this chart from The Economist, with the question, "What is it about the old British Empire and house prices?" I replied with the usual stuff on Chinese investment, low interest rates and strong economies, and he came back on the ratios of household debt to GDP, price to disposable income and price to rents. The Economist has a fantastic interactive chart showing 27 countries, but for all their skilled analysis, they've been wrong on Australia since 2002. They now call it 'severely overpriced', and surely we're due at least a flat period.