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Allianz chief warns of real estate bubble

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Allianz chief warns of real estate bubble
Photo: DPA

Germany faces a possible real estate bubble the new chief financial officer of the financial services company Allianz has warned.

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Maximilian Zimmerer told Monday’s Süddeutsche Zeitung newspaper that Germany could experience a real estate bubble with extremely high prices suddenly crashing.

“The bubble would not be driven by large institutional investors, but by private investors, who fear inflation and the collapse of the euro and are trying to escape by buying property,” Zimmerer said in the interview with the paper, his first since taking on his job.

“I see risks building up for the future,” he told the paper. “The central banks are flooding the world with cheap money. Low interest rates lead in the long run to misguided investments. The real estate bubbles in the US, Spain and Ireland have shown that.”

Zimmerer said that Europe was “on the way to recovery” from the euro crisis, and that the economic bloc needed more time to let the structural reforms and austerity measures take full effect.

He also made a plea for concessions for Greece, arguing that the country needed more time to return to economic growth. The country has called for two more years to complete its cutbacks, which the German government and other donor nations have so far rejected, the paper reports.

The Local/mbw

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