'Australia faces property crash, taking the economy with it'

Australia has set itself up for a classic property crash - and potentially take the economy with it - if our luck doesn't hold, the expatriate Professor Steve Keen has forecast.

Chinese buyers had given Australia's debt-booze-addled gamblers a possible out.

"Australians are now gambling on whether the fallout from China's crash will prick their own bubble, or inflate it once more," he suggested.

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"In everywhere but Australia, I'm famous for predicting the 2008 crash," the UK based former Sydney professor told his recent Irish audience ahead of a conference next month.

"In Australia, I'm famous for being wrong about house prices - they rose after the crash, when I expected them to fall."

Also read: Aussie house prices to drop

He says he partly got the cause right, but the direction of the cause wrong with his 2008 forecast.

"As the Irish know only too well, what really causes house prices to rise rapidly is too much mortgage debt, rising too quickly.

"House prices exploded here in the "Celtic Tiger" days, only to collapse when the mortgage bubble burst - bringing the economy down with it," he wrote in the Irish Independent.

Keen wrote that Australians avoided the nasty hangover "by the classic Antipodean method: they went for the 'Hair of the Dog' cure.

"Whereas the rest of the world unwound its mortgage debt, Australians piled into it - first in 2008 when the government turbocharged the market by doubling the grant it gave to first-home buyers, and then since 2012 when falling interest rates encouraged Baby Boomers to throw their so-called retirement savings into the housing market casino."

He said the Australian hangover cure worked, but at the expense of mortgaging Australia to the hilt.

When the crisis hit in 2008, Australian mortgage debt was already higher than in the USA: mortgage debt peaked at 72pc of GDP in America then, but Australia's level was 10pc higher again.

"Today, mortgage debt in the USA has fallen to 53pc of GDP-what wimps!

Also read: Australia's housing boom is over

"The hard-drinking Australians now have a mortgage debt level of 91pc of GDP and rising."

"As any fan of the 'Hair of the Dog' cure knows, it only works if you keep drinking.

"So can Australians maintain their record for insobriety and keep imbibing from the Bar of the Banks?

"Left to their own devices, I have little doubt that my ex-countrymen could keep knocking back the 4X of mortgage debt forever.

"But as 'Hair of the Dog' devotees also know, one danger of this cure is that the bartender will eventually refuse to serve you.

"And that seems to be happening in Australia now ....with the policeman (the "Australian Prudential Regulation Authority") finally awoken from his slumber, and is now insisting on less alcohol in the brew-otherwise known as a lower loan to valuation ratio.

Kenn says these moves seem to be have blown the froth off the Australian market.

In the boom days, more than 80pc of properties were sold at auction, and frequently for well over their reserves.

Steve Keen noted the auction clearance rate appears to be heading further south.

"Prices are still rising, but the rate of price increase has slowed. 

"As fans of rugby will appreciate, Australians can win on luck as well as talent.

"But it's only luck now that is keeping Australia from tasting the bitter brew that Ireland was forced to sip when the myth of the Celtic Tiger was exposed as a debt-drunkard's delusion.

"Australia has set itself up for a classic "Marsupial Tiger" crash.

Also read: Aussie dollar to slump to 68 US cents by end of 2015

"As the growth rate of mortgage debt slows, the market will come down and potentially take the economy with it.

"But Australians are relying on their other secret weapon: luck.

"Chinese buying of Australian real estate-partly as insurance against things going bad in China, partly to buy blue skies, which can't be bought in China for love nor money - has given Australia's debt-booze-addled gamblers a possible way to walk away from it all and appear sober rather than sozzled.

"However, China itself is going through its own property market crash, and there's no external force that will rescue its speculators from that fate.

"So Australians are now gambling on whether the fallout from China's crash will prick their own bubble, or inflate it once more."

Professor Steve Keen is just one of the many big names from the world of economics appearing at Kilkenomics, called Davos with jokes, in two weeks' time.