Housing fundamentalism fails

In surveying 21 market economists, Joye found the consensus was that house prices would "likely be 55 per cent higher in 10 years".

So take your pick. You can delve into the analysis and find all sorts of assumptions that may or may not cause the graphs to be wrong, or unreliable, or downright misleading.

You can talk about supply, demand, population growth, interest rates etc and feed whatever bias takes your fancy, but in the end no one really knows what is going to happen.

What Keen has on his side is the significance of debt.

Take a quick look around the world, especially Europe, at the moment and it doesn't take a PhD in economics to see debt is the major problem - well, not debt as such, just the staggeringly large amount of it.

The inability of politicians to resolve European debt problems makes for uncertain times, not to mention sluggish growth in the US and question marks over China. In uncertain times people tend to save and pay down debt, which could mean people are willing to pay less for houses, in the short term at least.

One thing is for certain: if house prices continue their slide, it is really going to test the faith of the real estate true believers. There will be a few people out there looking for a new religion.