Gotta love the Brits. England's the home of one of the biggest housing bubbles / ponzi schemes in the world, and Brit hot money has funded bubbles across Europe.
Let's see, they call it the "Housing Ladder", you can rent a place over here for less than 30% of the cost of "owning", every damn show on TV is about flipping homes, their economy is based on banking and housing, everyone wants to be a "buy-to-let" landlord, and the average home price is ELEVEN TIMES the average salary.
Now, this SHOCKING BBC investigation which compares the English housing bubble to past manias, including the South Sea Bubble and the dot-com bubble. Man, that's some great reporting. That's our taxpayer pounds at work over here (did I ever tell you about the TV Tax?).
Welcome to housingpanic.co.uk my Brit friends. A bit late to the party, but glad you could come...
Bubble trouble in housing market - Is there a bubble in the British housing market? We may soon find out.
Looking at every investment mania, from the South Sea bubble of the 18th Century to the stock market boom of the 1920s or the dotcom madness of more recent years, you find dubious deals and misleading numbers which helped persuade borrowers and investors to invest more than they should.
Ominously for the British housing market, a File on 4 investigation has highlighted two glaring examples of these bubble characteristics, both of which have encouraged people to borrow more than they should.
On the one hand, there is the overvaluation of buy-to-let properties. On the other hand is a blatant fraud - lying about your income to get a mortgage.
In the classic sign of a boom turning to a bust, the wall of Paula Jones' estate agency branch is covered with the details of properties that other buy-to-let investors are trying to sell.
September 29, 2007
Shocking BBC Investigation: There's a housing bubble in England! Oh my god, who knew!
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
7 comments:
I read in the UK papers that the "housing bubble" was so addictive that 10 to 15 percent of graduating teens wanted to buy a house, and get on the "housing ladder," rather than go to college! OMG!
Follow the link under the picture of that Parsons guy to find the rest of the story.
The lure of a fast buck is going to be the undoing of so many people.
Liar loans, Brit style.
I remember that once a friend of mine once tried to deny the bubble and justify high home prices in Massachusetts by comparing them to prices in Europe.
Her point was the prices weren't that high here compared to many parts of Europe. That was really all I needed to know to have a strong suspicion that this housing ponzi was global in scope and I told her so at the time.
This article just proves what many of us already knew.
The Great Hoax ... Housing
A bubble would indicate that people can't afford the price of their home based on their income.
Never mind.
do you mean british or english keith? prices in scotland (and even more so in northern ireland than anywhere else) are way out of line with fundamentals. so you probably should mean the uk.....
And we've been discussing the UK housing bubble since 2004 on http://www.housepricecrash.co.uk/forum :)
Post a Comment