“It’s different this time,” are four of the most alarming words an investor can hear. Very rarely do things turn out differently; history shows that normally they go wrong in almost exactly the same way they did last time round the cycle. But when it comes to the US housing market, there are reasons to expect that things will be different this time. But not in the way that optimists expect – instead the difference is that the damage could be more far-reaching than ever before. Plenty gets written about the vast scale of this real estate bubble, the world...