Great swaths of the world’s residential property market are not just in full recovery mode — they are booming. While the property pages in Britain have focused on a slight pick-up at the top end of the market, partly because of a revival in bankers’ bonuses, there is a full-scale boom happening elsewhere.

In Hong Kong, for example, residential property prices have rocketed by 28 per cent this year, with twice as many purchases last month as October last year. It is not only property prices that are rising, though. Commodity prices are also rampant, with the price of gold rising above $1,100 an ounce yesterday for the first time, with confidence boosted by India’s spectacular purchase, on Tuesday, of gold worth $6.7billion from the International Monetary Fund. Gold has risen by more than 25 per cent this year and copper by 50 per cent.

Appetite for risk among investors is also returning. “Spreads”, a measure of the risk premium demanded by investors in “junk bonds” issued by companies with poor credit ratings, have fallen back to where they were in February 2008 — some six months before Lehman Brothers, the US investment bank, collapsed.

So what is going on? In a nutshell, it is the consequence of ultra-low interest rates around the world. The bank rate in Britain has been 0.5 per cent since March 5 while, in the US, the Federal Reserve’s key policy rate has been at 0.25 per cent since December last year. The European Central Bank has also held rates down.

There are two major concerns. The first is that the cheap money glut risks creating asset bubbles — some of which may prove as difficult and as traumatic to burst as the credit bubble that built up before the crunch.

There are signs that markets are now starting to get edgy about this. Three central banks — Norway, Australia and Israel — have raised interest rates during the past few months to ward off incipient inflation, while a greater worry is what happens once the cheap money taps are turned off elsewhere in the world. We got a flavour of it this week when the Bank of England said that it would only extend its asset purchase scheme by a further £25 billion, pointing to an end to the policy altogether.

The second concern is specific to Britain, the only major world economy still in recession. In the United States this week Warren Buffett, the world’s most famous investor, splashed out $44 billion on Burlington Northern Santa Fe, a rail company, in his biggest deal — calling it a bet on America’s future. General Motors has sufficient confidence to pull the sale of its European arm, Opel.

By contrast, in Britain, most of our leading companies are still either in retrenchment mode, or speaking of “cautious optimism”, or warning that a recovery, when it comes, is some way away. Britain will probably come out of recession during the current quarter because, as night follows day, the economy cannot continue contracting indefinitely.

However, a lot of the growth during the current quarter is likely only to be “rented” from the first few months of next year, such as consumer spending being brought forward to avoid the planned rise in VAT rates on New Year’s Day. Britain remains, therefore, in real danger of the dreaded “double dip” recession.

Source: The Times