Chapter 10 examines the housing bubble which occurred in Ireland, Spain, the UK and the United States in the 2000s. House prices in many parts of these countries more than doubled in the years leading up to 2007. They then crashed with terrible consequences for the global financial system, which imploded in September 2008 when Lehman Brothers entered bankruptcy. The chapter then discusses how the bubble triangle explains this episode. Financial alchemy meant that mortgage finance could be provided to a wider range of people, thus making the family home much more marketable and an object of speculation. The spark which ignited the subprime bubble was a policy decision taken in the late 1990s that attempted to use loose mortgage lending standards as a substitute for government-provided social housing. The chapter concludes by examining the economic, social and political consequences of the bubble. The housing bubble of the 2000s is a perfect example of an economically and socially destructive bubble, despite extraordinary measures taken by governments and central bankers to save the system. The chapter concludes by drawing a line from the housing bubble and its collapse to the rise of populism.

This chapter examines the Christian Democratic ideology’s trajectory of diffusion and implantation outside its primary context of origin, focusing in particular on the two American continents. Most of the analysis will concentrate on the experience of Latin American Christian Democracy, since this is where Christian Democratic ideas and principles have had the greatest historical impact. As I already mentioned in the Introduction, in fact, almost all Latin American countries have had some sort of Christian Democratic party compete in national elections, and in several – notably in Chile, Mexico and Venezuela – these parties also succeeded in rising to power, even though Latin American Christian Democracy never acquired the degree of political hegemony it exercised in Europe during the second postwar period. In the final section of the chapter, I will also briefly consider the question of why no comparable Christian Democratic party or movement ever developed in the United States. This will offer the opportunity to examine the historical relevance of Christian Democratic ideas and principles to this context too, and to shed further light on some of this ideology’s distinctive features.