In our opinion, no. You’ve no doubt read stories about prices rising over the past few months, so you might be forgiven for assuming this means the worst of the housing market downturn is over and we’re getting back to business as usual. We don’t think that’s true.
The most important thing to understand about this [...]
This is an article that I could have written a few months ago, when the Bank of England stated its intention to begin ‘queasing’. But it has become rather more relevant now that one of the pronouncements of the G20 summit is that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) will itself begin to ‘print’ additional SDRs (Special Drawing Rights, effectively the IMF’s own currency) which its contributor countries can draw down in the shape of dollars, euros, etc.
Note my use of the word ‘print’ in the above paragraph. The days when first world countries used the printing press to increase the volume of money in circulation have long gone, assigned to eras such as Weimar Germany. Paper and ink are still heavily in use in Zimbabwe, of course, but for countries like the UK, where the notes and coins in circulation account for only about three percent of the total ‘money’ in the system, we’re really talking about digits on a computer screen.
Even so, while the phrase ‘quantitative easing’ sounds nice and strategic, in reality it has a similar effect to printing addition bank notes and throwing them out of the Bank of England’s window into the street.
To take a step back for a moment, let’s look at the main blunt instrument used by policy-makers to control the velocity of money and the rate of growth of an economy: interest rates. Set the base rate low, goes the received wisdom, and people will ‘invest’ their money rather than leaving it idle in a bank account earning nothing (or, depending on the level of true inflation, less than nothing). If the economy starts to run away from itself and bubbles form in a particular investment market, interest rates can be raised, increasing the appeal of saving and reducing the relative gains to be made by investing in speculative markets.
According to the British Bankers Association, the number of mortgages approved by major banks rose in February for the third consecutive month. Happy days are here again! Not quite, despite the rise, mortgages approvals are still close to historic lows and down over 30% on the same period for last year, so we’re not out [...]
The UK property market remains in freefall, with figures from Righmove.com showing the average price of a home in England and Wales has fallen by a shade under 5% over the past twelve months (although Halifax and Nationwide put that figure at 12%). According to the Council of Mortgage Lenders, UK mortgage lending has dropped [...]
We’ve all read the stories about rising house repossessions, as the people who over-stretched themselves to claw their way onto the property ladder ‘at any cost’ during the boom years suddenly realise that borrowing all that money to buy a property at a wildly inflated price probably wasn’t such a good idea after all. [...]