It's also worth remembering that the asset bubbles in Portugal, Ireland, Greece and Spain were inflated by the Eurozone's low interest rates. The reason those interest rates were set so low was to boost the German economy, which was in the doldrums, post-reunification.
Practice may of course deviate from theory, but i don't think it did much here.
German unification was 1990, we are talking about the time around 2000. Many central banks in the world lowered interest rates after the dot-com crash & 9-11 and the economic slowdown that followed.
You might argue that this caused asset bubbles, and i would tend to agree.
If it were up to me, i would add "avoiding asset bubbles" to the ECB mandate, if you want to you could regard it as a kind of price-stability mandate for assets.
But i would still claim that in the case of Greece, the (masked) public debt crisis preceded the asset bubble whereas in Spain, Portugal and Ireland the public debt crisis followed the asset bubble.
