Two years into the crisis, market participants now have a chance to look back and learn from the experience. One of the most striking aspects is how global and yet how local it has been. Countries in many parts of the world were players in either the financial bubble or the housing bubble or both, but the degree of impact, outcome and responses varied widely. This is an appropriate time to pull together the lessons from these varied experiences. This book consists of four parts. Part I introduces the framework for the book with a general introduction and follows the housing crisis in the US, as the core of the meltdown. Part II includes several chapters describing the evolution of housing markets and policy in the run-up to the crisis, impacts, and responses in Asian countries. Part III covers a similar breadth of topics on European housing markets. Part IV covers several countries in far-flung corners of the world, and which have some distinctive attributes. It concludes with an analytic chapter comparing experiences and linkages across countries and pointing to policy implications and research lessons drawn from these experiences.