Insight - ECB has to fight housing bubble with its hands tied

Cautious approach: A man runs on a bridge over the river Main in Frankfurt with the ECB building in the background. The cental bank is reluctant to raise interest rates too fast as it would leave some member states in debt crisis. — AP

FROM Luxembourg to New Zealand, global house prices have been surging as pandemic stimulus and a shift to work from home added fuel to a multi-year boom driven by historically low interest rates.

But whereas authorities from Auckland to Stockholm have shown they can pull monetary and regulatory levers to tame property prices, the eurozone’s fragmentation into 19 national markets means the European Central Bank’s (ECB) hands are tied.