That is one conclusion discussed by Jerome a Paris at the European Tribune, commenting on a recent WSJ article. France's economic growth has outpaced Germany's every year for the past ten, except for the last. Pourquoi? A boom in housing prices, asserts the WSJ, while Germany, suffering a downturn in the market for domestic domiciles since 1995, has been forced to make more of its earnings abroad in exports and foreign investment.

Jerome faults the argument as cunning revisionism, writing "it suggests that French banks have behaved just as 'exuberantly' as UK and US ones in lending to the population (which is largely false), and that the financial crisis is not a specifically 'Anglo' creature." The clever Anglo coinage here, referring not so subtly to the late great American real estate bubble, is useful in so much as it defines that part of country's growth that may be dangerously overinflated in the building, buying and selling of housing -- and teetering on the edge of a meltdown. Elsewhere in Europe, Spain comes to mind, as do the surging Pacific economies headed by China. Surely, Geman banks are not completely immune to damage from housing collapses abroad. Just ask Deutsche Bank, which just took a hefty hit in the subprime crash and now estimates the world's banks stand to lose up to USD 400 billion.

But for its domestic economy, Germany, says one commenter, "has a much higher proportion of rented property than anywhere else and that Germans are quite happy with that." There is something to be said for that kind of contentment.