I found this description of real estate in a piece by Michael Hudson, who was in turn writing about the forgotten work of Thorstein Veblen who wrote in the late 19th and early 20th Century. The context is the United States and the growth of small towns, but who cares, the story is the same wherever in New Zealand now! Our housing bubbles are built upon the same naked search for something for nothing, what's called 'rents' and 'rent seeking' in economics. What the banks do is just spray financial petrol - credit - upon whatever real estate embers are already smoking.
