Let's all jump together - for once

When I was at school (many years ago) a large part of the sadistic routine we were subjected to by our physical education teacher, an evil man with a curious penchant for brightly-coloured tracksuits, involved a huge trampoline. Not one of those beautiful round things made of softened rubber and fluffy safety nets that you see in so many back gardens today, but rather a Spartan arrangement of exposed steel springs and a rough, knee-grazing fabric. Once a week we stood round this instrument of torture, ourselves the only form of safety net, as one terrified child after another was forced to execute an ill-timed somersault, a ritual that as often as not culminated in a fresh nose-full of blood being added to the gymnasium floor.
 
But the exercise I remember most was comical in comparison. It involved 4 children at a time being asked to bounce in unison on the same trampoline. A seemingly easy task, but one which required a modicum of teamwork, a scarce commodity among knobbly-kneed 12-year olds.
 
The exercise would often start well enough, as they clung to each others’ shoulders in the centre of the trampoline and more by accident than craft found some sort of tentative rhythm that occasionally even produced a synchronized knee-drop or two. But it never lasted. Before long one of the kids would feel the need for speed and gradually stray from the middle ground in search of independent elbow-room. A foolishness which would inevitably result in a knee-buckling meltdown of unsynchronized jumping and one child after another popping off into the wallbars.
 
The reason I find myself reminded of this, is because somebody recently asked me if I thought it was possible for property markets around the world to act independently of each other. For the Asian market, for example, to grow independently of Europe and America. My answer, as I am sure you’ve guessed, is ‘yes’, but only for a knee-drop or two.
 
In other words, we need to continue working towards global banking reforms and a unified policy for ‘sensible’ access to credit. Perhaps the most important thing the world can learn from its recent economic problems is that property growth doesn’t have to follow a boom-bust pattern. That if we can just work out a way to permanently link shoulders, we can avoid any individual market being allowed to spoil the rhythm of growth for everyone else.