Let us not forget the utter joy of the Little Red Book incident: Chris Bryant visibly chewing wasps Screams of joy from the Tories And then Osborne's pair of Atomic Demolition Munitions: "Oh look, its his personal signed copy" and "the problem is, half the shadow cabinet have been sent to re-education"
Nobody should ever ask Chairman John for serious comments on anything.
As I mentioned below though, his 2017 budget plan was a lot more sensible than Friday's, and probably even his slightly more dodgy 2019 one a little more aswell.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Thats because (a) you have a lot of money and (b) you are singularly self-centred
We need a bingo market for Truss’s conference speech. What odds “the lady’s not for turning”?
I hadn't thought of that. Noel Gallagher wrote Oasis songs by liberating Beatles lyrics. Truss can write her speech by doing the same with Mrs Thatcher.
I think we'll probably achieve parity this week now.
Must be resignations if so - Kwarteng and Truss is on very thin ice
And what after that, the return of the Clown?
The Conservative Party is nuclear waste. I can't wait for 10% or 15% interest rates to come along, torpedo the property market and destroy them along with it. Bring it on.
I think that is a vengeance too far on your fellow brits
Indeed I expect they have already lost GE 24
Not good enough. Set the Tory Party on fire, throw it down a thousand foot mine shaft and back fill it with quick setting cement. I want this lot to go down to a Canada 1993 style wipeout.
Anyway, a major house price correction is overwhelmingly in the national interest (by which, I mean, the whole nation, defined as including people under 55 as well as those over 55.) UK real wages earlier this year were scarcely higher than they were 15 years ago, and that's before inflation really started to take off - now they're in decline again. If we wound house prices back just to where they were in 2007 that would involve a 40% correction; really we could do with them being cut fully in half.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
“Built” in Newton Aycliffe where built means assemble crates that arrive from Japan..
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
On a purchase contract where the manufacturer absolutely reamed the government because the DfT idiots negotiating on behalf of the future franchise bidders just agreed the first number given.
Your daily reminder that as Britain descends into impoverished anarchy, sent by their by its legally elected governing party…
Sweden has just put the far right into office Italy has just given a quasi fascist party more votes than anyone else The United States quite recently suffered an attempted coup and is in danger of another, or civil strife The German economy is expected to shrink by 4% this year….
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
Aye its certainly difficult, but there's no painless options.
half the problem is the we must avoid recession at all costs belief...this is what led to the Truss govts stupidity on borrowing...recessions are a natural part of the economic cycle....
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Too much time on pb will do that to you. I’m seriously thinking of time away, the relentless tide of doom monger is is starting to get wearisome. Yes the country is in a tight spot. We are not alone in this. We will get through this.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
PR would be interesting but I fear it won't be well thought through.
Also why is Labour endorsing the 19% basic rate? A national insurance cut would be far more sensible.
This is the issue with Labour
They have endorsed the 19% rate plus the abolition of the NI rise but said they will reinstate the 45% rate and spend it on nurses
The 45% rate produces approx 2 billion, while the other 2 costs 10 times = 20 billion and of course the row today is the 22 billion is all borrowed, so when Reeves said the new nurses were fully funded she was misleading as effectively it is borrowed money and they have also not said how they would recover the other 20 billion
Labour are as much a shambles as the conservatives, and we should all be very concerned about the future stewardship of our economy over the next 5 years or more
Labour are nowhere near the utter shambles of your precious Conservative Party. You may well want them to be bad so as to reduce the contrast effect between an inexperienced govt and the utter fools we currently have in govt.
Wish away. Wishing will not make a difference. This govt is either incompetent or corrupt - or possibly both - as no other interpretation of their behaviour makes any sense.
And if you support them, even tacitly, then you agree with what they are doing.
Your daily reminder that as Britain descends into impoverished anarchy, sent by their by its legally elected governing party…
Sweden has just put the far right into office Italy has just given a quasi fascist party more votes than anyone else The United States quite recently suffered an attempted coup and is in danger of another, or civil strife The German economy is expected to shrink by 4% this year….
And so on. And so forth. Get a bloody grip
Well, at least you accept it was an attempted coup.
In any case, 'Other people have it worse' is never going to cut much ice with people suffering here, and why would they? They expect (and are promised by parties) a great deal. It isn't unreasonable to hold them responsible if they dont delivery.
PR would be interesting but I fear it won't be well thought through.
Also why is Labour endorsing the 19% basic rate? A national insurance cut would be far more sensible.
This is the issue with Labour
They have endorsed the 19% rate plus the abolition of the NI rise but said they will reinstate the 45% rate and spend it on nurses
The 45% rate produces approx 2 billion, while the other 2 costs 10 times = 20 billion and of course the row today is the 22 billion is all borrowed, so when Reeves said the new nurses were fully funded she was misleading as effectively it is borrowed money and they have also not said how they would recover the other 20 billion
Labour are as much a shambles as the conservatives, and we should all be very concerned about the future stewardship of our economy over the next 5 years or more
Labour are nowhere near the utter shambles of your precious Conservative Party. You may well want them to be bad so as to reduce the contrast effect between an inexperienced govt and the utter fools we currently have in govt.
Wish away. Wishing will not make a difference. This govt is either incompetent or corrupt - or possibly both - as no other interpretation of their behaviour makes any sense.
And if you support them, even tacitly, then you agree with with they are doing.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
(((Dan Hodges))) @DPJHodges · 27m Imagine in years to come when people actually read in their history books “in the midst of a cost of living crisis, and with interest rates soaring, the British government announced tax cuts for the very richest people in society”. It’s up there with making your horse a senator.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Of course I’m in First
Ugh Standard UGH
Nonetheless I have plenty of friends and family in ordinary circs and they are not gnawing rats. And i can see the world around me. Truro looks a bit battered in parts of the town centre but it also has some lovely new shops and busy restaurants
We need a bingo market for Truss’s conference speech. What odds “the lady’s not for turning”?
I hadn't thought of that. Noel Gallagher wrote Oasis songs by liberating Beatles lyrics. Truss can write her speech by doing the same with Mrs Thatcher.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
Aye its certainly difficult, but there's no painless options.
half the problem is the we must avoid recession at all costs belief...this is what led to the Truss govts stupidity on borrowing...recessions are a natural part of the economic cycle....
The Truss back of a fag packet plan now means the worst of all worlds , mortgage rates and other loans and credit cards costing more so weakening consumer spending power . Inflation elevated for longer eating into those NI and tax cuts , the culmination of which means a recession anyway and more debt , the cost to service having shot up because the markets have lost confidence in the government .
In a few days we should be getting a break from the tanking pound and soaring gilts as, in descending order of likelihood, at least one of the following happens:
We need a bingo market for Truss’s conference speech. What odds “the lady’s not for turning”?
I hadn't thought of that. Noel Gallagher wrote Oasis songs by liberating Beatles lyrics. Truss can write her speech by doing the same with Mrs Thatcher.
The parallels are not absent. They were writing of 'the failure of the monetarist experiment' in the early 80's too.
I often recommend Nigel Lawson's The View From Number Eleven because, well, because it's very good. (And it starts with the Howe Chancellorship in 1979, when Lawson was his Chief Secretary.)
One of the interesting bits is how different the perception (40 years later) and the reality are.
For example, one of the first things the Thatcher government did was to raise taxes, because the gap between spending and tax receipts had widened. In fact, in both 1980 and 1981, the Conservatives increased the tax take markedly, even as they clamped down on spending.
From Wikipedia:
The budget increased net taxes by £4 billion (in 1981 prices).[3]
A new 20% tax on North Sea oil was introduced.[1]
A one-off windfall tax on certain bank deposits was introduced, in the form of a 2.5% levy on deposits of banking businesses, charged by reference to non-interest bearing sterling deposits in excess of £10 million averaged over the final three months of 1980.[2] The tax was estimated to raise £400 million in total revenues (in 1981 prices).[1]
There was no increase in income tax personal allowances or tax rate thresholds, resulting in a significant real-terms income tax rise as inflation was around 15% per year at the time.[1]
The 25p rate of tax introduced by Labour in 1978 was abolished.[4]
Duties were raised significantly, with duty on petrol increased by 20p per gallon, duty on a packet of 20 cigarettes increased by 13p, duty on beer increased by 4p, duty on spirits increased by 60p, and duty on wine increased by 12p.[1]
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Too much time on pb will do that to you. I’m seriously thinking of time away, the relentless tide of doom monger is is starting to get wearisome. Yes the country is in a tight spot. We are not alone in this. We will get through this.
Quite so. Quite so
It’s like me banging on about aliens only 3000 times more boring
Politically, Truss's mistake was probably overestimating how much her thinking had been absorbed by the body politic. She assumed people would understand the direction she was going in, but instead she's left them confused. Given the delay because of the Queen's death, it might have been better to save her 'shock and awe' plan until after the party conference.
It cannot really be known how much of the attack on the pound was priced in, once the Truss Government signalled that growth was the priority, not paying down the deficit. They may have thought if t'were done, tis better that t'were done quickly.
The situation is not a comfortable one, I'll admit that freely. Given that Truss publicly stated she was prepared to be unpopular, I must assume that she has a plan to improve her popularity before a general election.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
that financial juggling by the arrogant spivs feeds a huge service economy in the SE of England...i agree its not the way we should be doing things butgetting from here to there will be painful
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
We don't here much on the "march of the makers" or the "Northern Powerhose" from this bunch.
US Federal Reserve’s Rafael Bostic in interview with @washpost
UK crisis “not helping” avoid global recession, reaction to plan is “a real concern” for European and US growth. Fed “watching closely” but Kwarteng tax cuts “are just proposals”.
I get it now. Gareth Southgate is Graham Taylor. Absolutely wedded to *his* stars regardless of whether they are past it, playing badly or at all.
Lets all have a practice. "Do I not like that" "Carlton, CARLTON" "I'm going to lose my job cos of this"
Under Southgate England have got to a World Cup semi final and a European Championship final.
That is already a better record than any England manager since Sir Alf Ramsey
He has" But - and its an increasingly large but - his decision-making looks more like Graham Taylor with every match. From tonight: “We felt tonight was a good opportunity to start Luke Shaw. He’s a super player." - erm no. He WAS super. Now he is shit. He isn't good enough for his club, why is he good enough with no play time for England?
Same with Harry Maguire, whose only remaining value to United is highlighting via his absence how good the replacements defenders are. Southgate clings to the same has-beens, and England's performance tanks.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
Let us not forget the utter joy of the Little Red Book incident: Chris Bryant visibly chewing wasps Screams of joy from the Tories And then Osborne's pair of Atomic Demolition Munitions: "Oh look, its his personal signed copy" and "the problem is, half the shadow cabinet have been sent to re-education"
Nobody should ever ask Chairman John for serious comments on anything.
As I mentioned below though, his 2017 budget plan was a lot more sensible than Friday's, and probably even his slightly more dodgy 2019 one a little more aswell.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
We don't here much on the "march of the makers" or the "Northern Powerhose" from this bunch.
Northern Powerhose is what TSE pays pole dancers to shimmy out of on payday evenings, presumably.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Too much time on pb will do that to you. I’m seriously thinking of time away, the relentless tide of doom monger is is starting to get wearisome. Yes the country is in a tight spot. We are not alone in this. We will get through this.
Quite so. Quite so
It’s like me banging on about aliens only 3000 times more boring
To be fair if we just have an economic collapse but avoid nuclear war i will take that at the present time...
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
We have plenty of engineering excellence. From Formula 1 to RR
And the idea that we all export is financial services is as delusional as saying all Cornish people are geniuses
As an economy we can do better. We all know that. But we are not some helpless swamp of inadequacy
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
that financial juggling by the arrogant spivs feeds a huge service economy in the SE of England...i agree its not the way we should be doing things butgetting from here to there will be painful
However, Trussonimics, in as much as it is about anything, is about enticing more arrogant global spivs to the UK, so we can take a slice off their slice.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
that financial juggling by the arrogant spivs feeds a huge service economy in the SE of England...i agree its not the way we should be doing things butgetting from here to there will be painful
All those Pret lunches and after work fizz. Backbone of the economy.
Well I think I'm fucked. Had an offer on my first ever house accepted on Friday, just trying to get everything sorted/the ball rolling and I have an appointment with my Mortgage advisor on Wednesday. Was looking for a fixed rate for 5 years and it sounds like all the major lenders Halifax etc are pulling their products.
Going into the meeting on Wednesday with a completely different mindset now and expectation that they will tell me news which means I cannot proceed any further.
I feel completely beaten.
Fixed rates will be back - just more expensive
It sucks.
But you should rerun the calculations on what you can afford with the new rates and then go back to the seller and ask them to share the pain (by cutting their price).
You run the risk they say “no” but I suspect they are scared too. In any event, this isn’t the time to over extend yourself
We need a bingo market for Truss’s conference speech. What odds “the lady’s not for turning”?
I hadn't thought of that. Noel Gallagher wrote Oasis songs by liberating Beatles lyrics. Truss can write her speech by doing the same with Mrs Thatcher.
The parallels are not absent. They were writing of 'the failure of the monetarist experiment' in the early 80's too.
I often recommend Nigel Lawson's The View From Number Eleven because, well, because it's very good. (And it starts with the Howe Chancellorship in 1979, when Lawson was his Chief Secretary.)
One of the interesting bits is how different the perception (40 years later) and the reality are.
For example, one of the first things the Thatcher government did was to raise taxes, because the gap between spending and tax receipts had widened. In fact, in both 1980 and 1981, the Conservatives increased the tax take markedly, even as they clamped down on spending.
From Wikipedia:
The budget increased net taxes by £4 billion (in 1981 prices).[3]
A new 20% tax on North Sea oil was introduced.[1]
A one-off windfall tax on certain bank deposits was introduced, in the form of a 2.5% levy on deposits of banking businesses, charged by reference to non-interest bearing sterling deposits in excess of £10 million averaged over the final three months of 1980.[2] The tax was estimated to raise £400 million in total revenues (in 1981 prices).[1]
There was no increase in income tax personal allowances or tax rate thresholds, resulting in a significant real-terms income tax rise as inflation was around 15% per year at the time.[1]
The 25p rate of tax introduced by Labour in 1978 was abolished.[4]
Duties were raised significantly, with duty on petrol increased by 20p per gallon, duty on a packet of 20 cigarettes increased by 13p, duty on beer increased by 4p, duty on spirits increased by 60p, and duty on wine increased by 12p.[1]
I'm not that much older than Truss, but I'm old enough to remember the painful bit before the orgy of tax cutting.
There are legit questions about how much high Thatcherism was gain after the pain, and how much it was getting lucky with flogging off the silver. But Truss is treating it as a get-rich-quick scam.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
yes but eventually interest rates would fall again...then they would be cheap...would likely take years to play out though
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
People already don't have to pay 50% of income for housing, but many do in order to outcompete other people to live in desirable areas. They do so by bidding future labour income. At high interest rates, that future income is worth much less today. So prices come down. But it doesn't mean you have liberated a ton of wellbeing, just that future money is worth less so you bid less. If you started with a ton of cash - great for you - but that is like any other deflation moment. And not everyone does.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
If the pound falls below one dollar that would be a huge deal.
For who?
That line has never been crossed before and would be the nail in the coffin for the governments fiscal credibility . The BOE would have to step in and at that point the next time the Tories have the cheek to attack Labours plans they would get the derision they deserve .
No it wouldn't. No they wouldn't. And perhaps - that's politics.
The economics of below 0.99 are not that much different from 1.02. However going and staying below parity would be a political humiliation that would probably kill any chance of a Tory recovery.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
yes but eventually interest rates would fall again...then they would be cheap...would likely take years to play out though
Once the rates go down again, the prices go up. Because people use their future income to bid on houses against each other.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
Well I think I'm fucked. Had an offer on my first ever house accepted on Friday, just trying to get everything sorted/the ball rolling and I have an appointment with my Mortgage advisor on Wednesday. Was looking for a fixed rate for 5 years and it sounds like all the major lenders Halifax etc are pulling their products.
Going into the meeting on Wednesday with a completely different mindset now and expectation that they will tell me news which means I cannot proceed any further.
I feel completely beaten.
Fixed rates will be back - just more expensive
It sucks.
But you should rerun the calculations on what you can afford with the new rates and then go back to the seller and ask them to share the pain (by cutting their price).
You run the risk they say “no” but I suspect they are scared too. In any event, this isn’t the time to over extend yourself
Good luck!
PM me if you want
That calculation will be repeated in transactions across the land - lower affordability of mortgage payments means lower house prices.
Lower house prices means unhappy pensioners / boomers / other rich people who have enjoyed the extraordinary boom in house prices over the last two decades or so.
Assuming asset-rich homeowners disproportionately vote Conservative, how will they feel about the value of their primary asset tanking? How will they vote?
There's a reason the Conservatives have done so much over the last decade to keep the house price ponzi going, from stamp duty relief to "help" to buy (really help to inflate prices).
Looks like the party is over, there is going to be one hell of a hangover.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
yes but eventually interest rates would fall again...then they would be cheap...would likely take years to play out though
Once the rates go down again, the prices go up. Because people use their future income to bid on houses against each other.
no because confidence will be shattered by then...people wont jump in quickly...people were frightened to buy property in the mid 90s when prices were rock bottom
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
We have plenty of engineering excellence. From Formula 1 to RR
And the idea that we all export is financial services is as delusional as saying all Cornish people are geniuses
As an economy we can do better. We all know that. But we are not some helpless swamp of inadequacy
A few remaining islands of success while the mainland has sunk beneath the waves. There are many factors for the decline in UK engineering and manufacturing. There were signs that the government was trying to reverse this, but with Truss, I'd be amazed if it is pursued.
And I acknowledge that the Blair government did a shite job in this area too.
If the pound falls below one dollar that would be a huge deal.
For who?
That line has never been crossed before and would be the nail in the coffin for the governments fiscal credibility . The BOE would have to step in and at that point the next time the Tories have the cheek to attack Labours plans they would get the derision they deserve .
No it wouldn't. No they wouldn't. And perhaps - that's politics.
The economics of below 0.99 are not that much different from 1.02. However going and staying below parity would be a political humiliation that would probably kill any chance of a Tory recovery.
I rarely agree with you. Except on defence, sometimes
But I agree dollar parity would be a large psychological blow and would deeply damage Kwarteng and Truss
It doesn’t really matter. But the symbolism is dire and the tarnish would be long lasting
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
OK I assumed from the truro falmouth train this morning you had come down from paddington this morning
Doing that journey on Friday, only starting from Liskeard, for 3 days sailing.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
I have not watched an England football match outside of a major tournament for ages so I decided to turn it on and my first sight was that it appears that a large tropical bird has gorged on a giant plate full of fruits of the Forrest pudding and shat on Reece James’ head. Maybe it will be lucky for him.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
We have plenty of engineering excellence. From Formula 1 to RR
And the idea that we all export is financial services is as delusional as saying all Cornish people are geniuses
As an economy we can do better. We all know that. But we are not some helpless swamp of inadequacy
A few remaining islands of success while the mainland has sunk beneath the waves. There are many factors for the decline in UK engineering and manufacturing. There were signs that the government was trying to reverse this, but with Truss, I'd be amazed if it is pursued.
And I acknowledge that the Blair government did a shite job in this area too.
It’s just not true. And it’s also irrelevant. In case you hadn’t noticed those brilliant manufacturers the Japanese have suffered 20-30 years of stagnating incomes and their GDP per capita is now below the UK
So making brilliant trains hasn’t really done them that much good has it?
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Absolutely not the case AFAIK (but Leon dislikes discussion of his IRL identity).
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I have not watched an England football match outside of a major tournament for ages so I decided to turn it on and my first sight was that it appears that a large tropical bird has gorged on a giant plate full of fruits of the Forrest pudding and shat on Reece James’ head. Maybe it will be lucky for him.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Absolutely not the case AFAIK (but Leon dislikes discussion of his IRL identity).
We've established it is from artisanal flint knapping rather than inherited wealth.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
Your dad was an artisanal flint knapper and you have followed
In a few days we should be getting a break from the tanking pound and soaring gilts as, in descending order of likelihood, at least one of the following happens:
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
Well I think I'm fucked. Had an offer on my first ever house accepted on Friday, just trying to get everything sorted/the ball rolling and I have an appointment with my Mortgage advisor on Wednesday. Was looking for a fixed rate for 5 years and it sounds like all the major lenders Halifax etc are pulling their products.
Going into the meeting on Wednesday with a completely different mindset now and expectation that they will tell me news which means I cannot proceed any further.
I feel completely beaten.
Fixed rates will be back - just more expensive
It sucks.
But you should rerun the calculations on what you can afford with the new rates and then go back to the seller and ask them to share the pain (by cutting their price).
You run the risk they say “no” but I suspect they are scared too. In any event, this isn’t the time to over extend yourself
Good luck!
PM me if you want
That calculation will be repeated in transactions across the land - lower affordability of mortgage payments means lower house prices.
Lower house prices means unhappy pensioners / boomers / other rich people who have enjoyed the extraordinary boom in house prices over the last two decades or so.
Assuming asset-rich homeowners disproportionately vote Conservative, how will they feel about the value of their primary asset tanking? How will they vote?
There's a reason the Conservatives have done so much over the last decade to keep the house price ponzi going, from stamp duty relief to "help" to buy (really help to inflate prices).
Looks like the party is over, there is going to be one hell of a hangover.
Millennials who have just managed to claw their way onto the property ladder in the last 5 years are fucked again.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
You should indeed:
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
Well I think I'm fucked. Had an offer on my first ever house accepted on Friday, just trying to get everything sorted/the ball rolling and I have an appointment with my Mortgage advisor on Wednesday. Was looking for a fixed rate for 5 years and it sounds like all the major lenders Halifax etc are pulling their products.
Going into the meeting on Wednesday with a completely different mindset now and expectation that they will tell me news which means I cannot proceed any further.
I feel completely beaten.
Fixed rates will be back - just more expensive
It sucks.
But you should rerun the calculations on what you can afford with the new rates and then go back to the seller and ask them to share the pain (by cutting their price).
You run the risk they say “no” but I suspect they are scared too. In any event, this isn’t the time to over extend yourself
Good luck!
PM me if you want
That calculation will be repeated in transactions across the land - lower affordability of mortgage payments means lower house prices.
Lower house prices means unhappy pensioners / boomers / other rich people who have enjoyed the extraordinary boom in house prices over the last two decades or so.
Assuming asset-rich homeowners disproportionately vote Conservative, how will they feel about the value of their primary asset tanking? How will they vote?
There's a reason the Conservatives have done so much over the last decade to keep the house price ponzi going, from stamp duty relief to "help" to buy (really help to inflate prices).
Looks like the party is over, there is going to be one hell of a hangover.
Millennials who have just managed to claw their way onto the property ladder in the last 5 years are fucked again.
Cursed generation.
Liked but only because that’s the only option. Just be glad up north prices aren’t as insane as down south…
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
You should indeed:
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
Their experience of the property market was usually from buying in a high-inflation, high-interest rate environment where the ladder effect was real.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
Your dad was an artisanal flint knapper and you have followed
If the pound falls below one dollar that would be a huge deal.
For who?
That line has never been crossed before and would be the nail in the coffin for the governments fiscal credibility . The BOE would have to step in and at that point the next time the Tories have the cheek to attack Labours plans they would get the derision they deserve .
No it wouldn't. No they wouldn't. And perhaps - that's politics.
The economics of below 0.99 are not that much different from 1.02. However going and staying below parity would be a political humiliation that would probably kill any chance of a Tory recovery.
I rarely agree with you. Except on defence, sometimes
But I agree dollar parity would be a large psychological blow and would deeply damage Kwarteng and Truss
It doesn’t really matter. But the symbolism is dire and the tarnish would be long lasting
The Labour adverts are writing themselves faster than their strategists can take notes.
In a few days we should be getting a break from the tanking pound and soaring gilts as, in descending order of likelihood, at least one of the following happens:
A young man shot and wounded the chief recruitment officer at a military enlistment station in Russia’s Irkutsk region on Monday
When people think it's safer to shoot up the recruiting center than to join the army, it's a sign things aren't going well
Apparently a number of recruitment offices have also fallen victim to arson.
All those people who were perfectly happy to see the population of Ukraine exterminated just so long as they didn't have to go and get their own hands bloody. Not happy bunnies. Not happy at all.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
IET. Hitachi train. Japanese tech.
There's a shining example of our decline.
It’s not decline. It’s free trade. If the Japanese can make good smart trains at a decent price - great, we can buy them. And then we can sell the stuff we do well back to them. Like, say, education
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
I think we should still be capable of engineering excellence.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
We have plenty of engineering excellence. From Formula 1 to RR
And the idea that we all export is financial services is as delusional as saying all Cornish people are geniuses
As an economy we can do better. We all know that. But we are not some helpless swamp of inadequacy
A few remaining islands of success while the mainland has sunk beneath the waves. There are many factors for the decline in UK engineering and manufacturing. There were signs that the government was trying to reverse this, but with Truss, I'd be amazed if it is pursued.
And I acknowledge that the Blair government did a shite job in this area too.
It’s just not true. And it’s also irrelevant. In case you hadn’t noticed those brilliant manufacturers the Japanese have suffered 20-30 years of stagnating incomes and their GDP per capita is now below the UK
So making brilliant trains hasn’t really done them that much good has it?
For a country whose only natural resource is human capital Japan has done alright for itself.
We had natural resources. Coal, oil, gas. Either shut down, sold off on the cheap or pissed away for short term gain.
The UK might not be a basket case, but we could be so much more. For too long and too often we have been let down by those in charge.
Emulating the worst aspects of other countries is not a recipe for success.
BREAKING: Labour members have backed a motion calling for proportional representation. First time a major party represented in the UK parliament has suggested ditching first past the post. https://twitter.com/PaulBrandITV/status/1574443496064401410
Hardly, Labour promised it once before, and got as far as holding a commission to come up with the alternative. Then Palmer and his mates ditched the promise altogether. How history might have gone differently….
And a bit further back, the Liberals were pushing it through Parliament when the proposal got derailed by the First World War.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
It's only nouves who boast about how much they've spent on stuff and who call themselves "affluent" or "wealthy".
Those who are from "good English families with inherited wealth" think it's as common as muck to talk about how much you've spent on this or that, and what they call themselves is RICH.
PS I have observed Tory party activists in the field, not while they are doing political work but when they are simply socialising, and there are contexts when you just know
a) they will be talking about money, not just once but repeatedly, over and over again, to a point that would make a normal person want to vomit, and
b) they won't call it money - they will use euphemisms.
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
You should indeed:
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
Well, yes, but 2008-23 is verging on the long run, and what are we all dead in? I mean, renting sucks, so should someone who could afford to buy in 2009 have been renting since then because, Mark my words, boy, what goes down must come up?
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
You should indeed:
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
parents only talk from their own experience...thats why its best to take what they say with a pinch of salt....success has many fathers but failure is an orphan always remember that
The people who've suddenly discovered inflation in the past twelve months who are suddenly concerned would be more credible if they'd had a proper handle on inflation in house prices etc for the past couple of decades.
In house costs the average inflation rate is over 6% compound annual price growth, over decades.
That's no better than CPI 6%.
Asset inflation good Price inflation bad
One person's asset is another person's price.
Both are equally bad. Expensive houses is no better than expensive gas, or potatoes, or cars.
This is true, but there's a couple of important caveats:
(1) Lots of people owe money secured on their primary properties. Nominal falls in the value of property make it hard for people to move home, because they end up with negative equity. (And, of course, you don't actually need property values to fall below the mortgage total to prevent people from being able to move: stamp duty, solicitors fees, and the requirement for a new deposit all mean that if your property falls below - say - a 15% premium to your mortgage, then you could be in trouble.)
Negative equity matters because it impacts labour mobility. And labour mobility matters because it helps get the right people in the right jobs.
(2) Falling house prices directly affect people's "personal wealth" calculations. If it declines, they compensate by saving more. Now, one can argue (and probably should argue) that Brits should save more. But if Brits start saving more at the same time they're also paying more for their mortgages (higher interest rates) and for their utilities (higher gas and electricity bills), then that's going to squeeze disposable income hard.
property crash in the early 90s led to a booming economy several years later...yes there were many sob stories in the media at the time but no govt can mitigate all risk...if they do we have the obscenity of a housing market we have in the uk today
Yes. Let the heresy be heard: stupidly expensive houses = bad, dirt cheap houses = good. A massive crash would be a moment of national renewal, basically a tsunami of redistribution from old to young, rentiers to renters, the non-productive to the workers. We can but dream of a land where people don't have to spend half their income for fifty years to buy a bog standard three bedroom semi - yet perhaps, just maybe, there is a small glimmer of hope that it may yet come to pass.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
They wouldn't be cheap houses at 10% interest rates, or at least no more affordable to non-cash buyers.
Assuming you take out the biggest mortgage you can afford, you are better off in a scenario where the interest rate is 10% than if the interest rate is 2%, because:
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments b) general inflation works in your favour c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
Fundamentally, high interest rates because of high inflation mean that consumers are entering into accelerated (real terms) paydowns of their mortgages.
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
Yes, but if you took out a mortgage at 3%, you should probably have considered that such rates were historically anomalous.
You should indeed:
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
Well, yes, but 2008-23 is verging on the long run, and what are we all dead in? I mean, renting sucks, so should someone who could afford to buy in 2009 have been renting since then because, Mark my words, boy, what goes down must come up?
That's what was so evil about all the policies, monetary and otherwise, designed to keep the property bubble inflated.
Oh look, not only are living standards being blasted back to the 1950s*, it looks like we're going to have smog to go with it. Lovely.
*Except for Tory MPs, party donors, and other bulk consumers of foie gras
Had my first wood burner fire of the season yesterday evening. Gas central heating remains firmly off.
If one person unblocks an open fire it's a quaint feature, and leaving the gas off might even save them money.
If a million people unblock their open fires then the air becomes filthy, a load of them sicken and die from breathing in particulates, and desperate homeowners venture forth into streets and parks and start hacking down trees for firewood.
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sa yell come uvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
OK: do you come from a bad English family with inherited wealth, like the Malfoys?
I come from a completely fucked up Cornish family which - despite some very posh antecedents in the far distant past - was so poor in recent times that my maternal granny worked in a mine aged 9 and my paternal great grandfather mined tin under the sea at Botallack and died at about 35
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
It's none of their effing business, Leon. This isn't PoliticalBareyoursoul.com
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Don’t see what the problem is. Scooting along the GWR line between Dawlish and the sea, guzzling an excellent chateauneuf du pape, eating a nice piece of free fruit cake, and watching Vikings Valhalla
And most of my earnings are in dollars and euro. The Tories have just given me an overnight 5% pay rise
They get my vote!
Give my regards to the atmospheric pumpiong house at Starcross.
GWR have really comfortable, clean, sleek new trains (I haven’t done this journey by rail in ages)
They are punctual and gleaming. Well staffed. They go from Paddington to Truro in 4 hrs 32 mins. They are as good as anything on the continent, if not quite as fast and maybe pricier (or maybe not)
I sometimes - genuinely - don’t recognise the PB portrait of the UK as this toilet of decline and despair
Even if you are not travelling first, you have today spent comfortably more than a month of Universal Credit on wine, trains and oysters.
Actually not true. I just checked. Universal Credit is £334 a month for a single claimant aged 25 or over
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey) Chats with family: free £82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc £112 single first class train Truro Paddington £19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range The fruit cake is free in first £15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
Leon i imagine you come from a good english family with inherited wealth....dont think its just your travel writing from which you draw income...a nice trust fund perchance
Nope. Wrong
Your dad was an artisanal flint knapper and you have followed
Anyone who thinks that there is a forthcoming house price crash needs to answer the 'build cost problem' that I keep repeating, because no one has ever come back to me with any meaningful response.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon@kyf_100
Comments
There's a shining example of our decline.
(a) you have a lot of money and
(b) you are singularly self-centred
Anyway, a major house price correction is overwhelmingly in the national interest (by which, I mean, the whole nation, defined as including people under 55 as well as those over 55.) UK real wages earlier this year were scarcely higher than they were 15 years ago, and that's before inflation really started to take off - now they're in decline again. If we wound house prices back just to where they were in 2007 that would involve a 40% correction; really we could do with them being cut fully in half.
Or do you think we should still be mainly farming sheep so we can sell the wool to the continent?
Sweden has just put the far right into office
Italy has just given a quasi fascist party more votes than anyone else
The United States quite recently suffered an attempted coup and is in danger of another, or civil strife
The German economy is expected to shrink by 4% this year….
And so on. And so forth. Get a bloody grip
Lets all have a practice.
"Do I not like that"
"Carlton, CARLTON"
"I'm going to lose my job cos of this"
Yes the country is in a tight spot. We are not alone in this. We will get through this.
Wish away. Wishing will not make a difference. This govt is either incompetent or corrupt - or possibly both - as no other interpretation of their behaviour makes any sense.
And if you support them, even tacitly, then you agree with what they are doing.
In any case, 'Other people have it worse' is never going to cut much ice with people suffering here, and why would they? They expect (and are promised by parties) a great deal. It isn't unreasonable to hold them responsible if they dont delivery.
An economy based on the financial juggling of a bunch of arrogant spivs who never have to face the consequences of their failures is just one giant Ponzi Scheme. And it looks like the shit is now hitting the fan.
Ugh Standard UGH
Nonetheless I have plenty of friends and family in ordinary circs and they are not gnawing rats. And i can see the world around me. Truro looks a bit battered in parts of the town centre but it also has some lovely new shops and busy restaurants
Falmouth the same. And so on
That is already a better record than any England manager since Sir Alf Ramsey
1. Hurricane Ian (now quite rapidly intensifying as it heads towards Cuba) brings a big storm surge and bucketloads of rain to Tampa Bay https://yaleclimateconnections.org/2022/09/hurricane-ian-poses-serious-risks-to-florida-gulf-coast/
2. Ukraine’s troops in Luhansk complete an encirclement and victory in Lyman cutting off Russian troops to the South https://twitter.com/threshedthought/status/1574406408564506628?s=21&t=CZsYZwGNRBLTxBT2qUVyug
3. The anti mobilisation protests in some Russian republics turn into full on rebellion
4. Something similar develops from the Iranian protests
One of the interesting bits is how different the perception (40 years later) and the reality are.
For example, one of the first things the Thatcher government did was to raise taxes, because the gap between spending and tax receipts had widened. In fact, in both 1980 and 1981, the Conservatives increased the tax take markedly, even as they clamped down on spending.
From Wikipedia:
The budget increased net taxes by £4 billion (in 1981 prices).[3]
A new 20% tax on North Sea oil was introduced.[1]
A one-off windfall tax on certain bank deposits was introduced, in the form of a 2.5% levy on deposits of banking businesses, charged by reference to non-interest bearing sterling deposits in excess of £10 million averaged over the final three months of 1980.[2] The tax was estimated to raise £400 million in total revenues (in 1981 prices).[1]
There was no increase in income tax personal allowances or tax rate thresholds, resulting in a significant real-terms income tax rise as inflation was around 15% per year at the time.[1]
The 25p rate of tax introduced by Labour in 1978 was abolished.[4]
Duties were raised significantly, with duty on petrol increased by 20p per gallon, duty on a packet of 20 cigarettes increased by 13p, duty on beer increased by 4p, duty on spirits increased by 60p, and duty on wine increased by 12p.[1]
It’s like me banging on about aliens only 3000 times more boring
The situation is not a comfortable one, I'll admit that freely. Given that Truss publicly stated she was prepared to be unpopular, I must assume that she has a plan to improve her popularity before a general election.
How many goals have been scored in the last half dozen in England games? 2?
UK crisis “not helping” avoid global recession, reaction to plan is “a real concern” for European and US growth. Fed “watching closely” but Kwarteng tax cuts “are just proposals”.
Same with Harry Maguire, whose only remaining value to United is highlighting via his absence how good the replacements defenders are. Southgate clings to the same has-beens, and England's performance tanks.
If Andrew Bailey jacked the bank rate up by 10% tomorrow he'd be a bloody national hero. That's not happening, but perhaps the unbuckable markets can force him to do it piecemeal? We shall see.
And the idea that we all export is financial services is as delusional as saying all Cornish people are geniuses
As an economy we can do better. We all know that. But we are not some helpless swamp of inadequacy
It's not a great aspiration.
It sucks.
But you should rerun the calculations on what you can afford with the new rates and then go back to the seller and ask them to share the pain (by cutting their price).
You run the risk they say “no” but I suspect they are scared too. In any event, this isn’t the time to over extend yourself
Good luck!
PM me if you want
under 65s likely massive labour lead
over 65s still clinging to nurse Tories
There are legit questions about how much high Thatcherism was gain after the pain, and how much it was getting lucky with flogging off the silver. But Truss is treating it as a get-rich-quick scam.
And they tend not to work.
My outgoings today are
£10 return train Truro-Falmouth (a charming little journey)
Chats with family: free
£82 on lunch - half a dozen porthilly oysters and one dressed Cornish crab, plus bottle of excellent kiwi Sauvignon blanc
£112 single first class train Truro Paddington
£19 bottle of chat du pape from Tesco finest range
The fruit cake is free in first
£15 taxI ride (I estimate) Paddington Camden at the end (maybe less)
So that’s £238. Quite a lot less than £334
I’m not denying I’m affluent. But your maths is wrong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32779CpfymI
Bonus HMQ joke included. Hey, it was a while ago.
Lower house prices means unhappy pensioners / boomers / other rich people who have enjoyed the extraordinary boom in house prices over the last two decades or so.
Assuming asset-rich homeowners disproportionately vote Conservative, how will they feel about the value of their primary asset tanking? How will they vote?
There's a reason the Conservatives have done so much over the last decade to keep the house price ponzi going, from stamp duty relief to "help" to buy (really help to inflate prices).
Looks like the party is over, there is going to be one hell of a hangover.
a) the principal is smaller so you get more bang for your buck on any overpayments
b) general inflation works in your favour
c) interest rate risk is more likely to be in your favour
And I acknowledge that the Blair government did a shite job in this area too.
But I agree dollar parity would be a large
psychological blow and would deeply damage Kwarteng and Truss
It doesn’t really matter. But the symbolism is dire and the tarnish would be long lasting
Doing that journey on Friday, only starting from Liskeard, for 3 days sailing.
So making brilliant trains hasn’t really done them that much good has it?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-humber-62984561
Oh look, not only are living standards being blasted back to the 1950s*, it looks like we're going to have smog to go with it. Lovely.
*Except for Tory MPs, party donors, and other bulk consumers of foie gras
However, while you are probably in a decent position if you took your mortgage out when rates were 10%, that isn't the case if you took it out when rates were 3%. In the latter scenario, you are entering into an accelerated (real terms) mortgage payback at the same time that your disposible income is being squeezed by rising commodities prices.
No. Precious feelings of small minority of Tory members who give a flying fuck about the country and its people not really a priority at the moment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/09/26/mobilization-putin-russia-war-ukraine/
A young man shot and wounded the chief recruitment officer at a military enlistment station in Russia’s Irkutsk region on Monday
When people think it's safer to shoot up the recruiting center than to join the army, it's a sign things aren't going well
Cursed generation.
And yet pretty much every parent in the land urged their children to "get on the property ladder".
He’s a chip off the old block.
All those people who were perfectly happy to see the population of Ukraine exterminated just so long as they didn't have to go and get their own hands bloody. Not happy bunnies. Not happy at all.
We had natural resources. Coal, oil, gas. Either shut down, sold off on the cheap or pissed away for short term gain.
The UK might not be a basket case, but we could be so much more. For too long and too often we have been let down by those in charge.
Emulating the worst aspects of other countries is not a recipe for success.
Any new funds have been generated by the latest generations. Put it that way
Those who are from "good English families with inherited wealth" think it's as common as muck to talk about how much you've spent on this or that, and what they call themselves is RICH.
PS I have observed Tory party activists in the field, not while they are doing political work but when they are simply socialising, and there are contexts when you just know
a) they will be talking about money, not just once but repeatedly, over and over again, to a point that would make a normal person want to vomit, and
b) they won't call it money - they will use euphemisms.
If a million people unblock their open fires then the air becomes filthy, a load of them sicken and die from breathing in particulates, and desperate homeowners venture forth into streets and parks and start hacking down trees for firewood.
The cost of building a house is about £2500 per square metre, so a small family home (100sqm) costs £250,000 just to build, because of rapid recent inflation in the cost of materials and labour, and recent expensive regulation.
A house price crash at the levels people envisage will lead to a shutdown of the third biggest industry in the UK (the real estate and development industry). No new build can ever happen because the cheapest these houses can be built and sold for (about £300k) cannot work for buyers. Even if you have a 75k deposit, the cost of servicing the debt on a £225k mortgage is about £15,750 per year (at 7%)- or £24750 if you are in a 25 year repayment mortgage. That is over £2k per month just in mortgage repayments before any other expenses - so double what they might be paying now with rates at 2%.
This means that very little or no housebuilding will take place because housing is unaffordable for people on average incomes, but demand will keep rising anyway due to immigration and new household formation. So rents associated with the existing housing stock will will just increase, and the housing market will be driven by investors exploiting this for good, stable returns.
It is not much to celebrate, just a catastrophe. @pigeon @kyf_100