Will America’s housing boom lead to another financial crisis?

A FAVOURED PASTIME for city dwellers on holiday to quainter towns and villages is to peruse the windows of local property firms and dream of swapping their cramped two-bedroom flat for an entire house and garden. Your correspondent is not immune to the appeal: she gazed wistfully at a pretty house near the Deschutes river in Bend, Oregon, situated among the lakes and peaks of the Cascade mountains (pictured). She dutifully checked the listing price on Zillow, a real-estate platform, only to face grim reality: the three-bedroom house was worth $1.25m, a 44% increase from a year earlier, yielding a price per square foot higher than Queens and most of Washington, DC.

It is hard not to feel unease at the spectacle America’s housing market is…