by Merav Levkowitz HGTV recently aired the Israel episode of House Hunters International, where two Chicago sisters with a $500,000 budget searched for an apartment in Tel Aviv. After being shown the three options available, they found themselves seriously debating between a rooftop duplex that was smaller than what they were looking for and a vintage apartment that was in such bad shape it would require at least $100,000 worth of repairs. Ultimately they chose the duplex, but the fact that a crumbling apartment with a price tag of half a million dollars was featured hints at the real estate markets in what was recently declared the nineteenth most expensive city in the world—a whole ten spots ahead of New York!  How did Tel Aviv become so expensive? For one reason, on a broad economic scale, Israel’s banking practices...

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