The editors of Global Housing Markets: Crises, Policies, and Institutions state that the book ‘was conceived for the purpose of examining if and how the “contagion” [of the subprime crisis that began in the United States in 2007] spread to housing markets throughout the world, what were the paths and transmission mechanisms by which it spread (through financial markets, directly through global real estate markets), and what was the institutional and regulatory context in which policy measures were adopted in response to the spreading financial crisis’ (pp. 1–2).

An introductory chapter by the editors is followed by chapters on the USA, Denmark, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain, the UK, Russia (two chapters), Serbia, China (two chapters), India (two chapters), Japan, Hong Kong, Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, Australia, Brazil, Canada and Israel. Thus in 564 pages a treasure-trove of information on housing markets is supplied and, although no rationale – other than a geographical division – is given for the choice of countries included, the reporting is sufficiently comprehensive to supply insights into national variations on the impacts of the financial crisis that originated within US housing markets. However, there is no final chapter that attempts to draw conclusions from this stack of data. Instead we have to rely on two pages in the introduction making rather bland statements such as ‘Regulatory structure and the will to enforce them make a difference’ and ‘Small interventions may keep a market from going off the cliff’ (p. 17). It would have been informative to have included an overview including data on the trends in housing prices in the countries under examination and explorations of such topics as the effects of ‘securitisation’, how declines in house values impacted on public finances, the links between a weak social sector in housing and the prevalence of subprime mortgages and the salience of financial institutions in relationship to any ‘global real estate markets’. Perhaps the lack of systematic themes permeating each chapter explains this dearth of robust conclusions, although the complex national institutional pathways of the processes involved may have contributed.

The salience of ‘system embedded’ national housing patterns can be illustrated by using the data in the ‘western Europe’ category to compare the impact in different countries of the US subprime crisis. On Germany, Thies Lindenthal and Piet Eichholtz state that ‘the global housing market crisis that started in 2007 largely left Germany untouched, and that also holds for the housing market boom that preceded it. Germany's housing market follows its own path’ (p. 69). Moreover, despite many German banks holding sizeable subprime portfolios from the United States, ‘the troubled industry, however, still served the home market and provided funds for private homeowners’ (p. 86). Commenting on the Dutch experience, Dirk Brounen and Piet Eichholtz conclude ‘the current global crisis has hardly affected pricing in the Dutch housing market’ (p. 145). However in Ireland and Spain dazzling house price increases were followed by significant slumps: a consequence of the magnitude of the booms followed by the confidence shock arising from the international liquidity and capital crisis driven by the revelation of the USA subprime debacle rather than bank exposure to ‘securitised’ products from the USA or internal subprime mortgages.

What of the United Kingdom? Christine Whitehead and Kathleen Scanlon identify ‘four main fundamentals of the UK housing market’ (p. 174) and claim that ‘These four elements – volatility, inelastic supply, mortgage-market deregulation, and government policy – came together by around 2005 to produce a long-term imbalance between the demand and supply of housing’ (p. 178). They note the impact of a subprime sector (very modest by USA standards) and the growing use of ‘securitised’ mortgage products followed by the tightening of credit restrictions after the failure of the US government to rescue Lehman Brothers. The result was a house price decline but, more significantly, a sharp fall in new housing investment.

In the boom housing years, from 2000 to 2007, the house price increase in the UK exceeded that in the USA, Ireland and Spain (The Economist, 2012) yet new house construction in the UK lagged way behind the other countries (in 2004, for example it was 3.2 per 1,000 of population in the UK, 19 in Ireland, 12.6 in Spain and 7.1 in the USA (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors, 2007; Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, 2012).

Thus, contrary to market theory, enhanced house prices in the UK produced an austere supply response. This UK housing dearth is the theme of Let's Build the Houses – Quick! – a title reflecting the Labour Party's 1945 housing policy statement. Cathy Davis and Alan Wigfield demolish New Labour's housing record, drawing attention to the role that the downgrading of social housing (at least until the ‘credit crunch’) played in the housing famine. They also offer an informed critique of Coalition government policies. However, their proposals for change, including – ‘with a song in my heart’ (p. 44) – an expansion of council housing to meet a large proportion of the requirements of the ‘just under three million additional households’ (pp. 51–2) needing housing by 2020, seem remote from the current Labour Party's song sheet.