Sunday, Sep 23, 2007
Do not miss this week's Davinomics
DavidSmith: Danger lurks as Bank credibility suffers
"On the other hand, money-market interest rates remain high in spite of last week’s swerve, and represent a tightening of monetary policy, particularly for the 60% of business borrowing directly linked to Libor" "PS: My reference last week to the fact that UK house prices are not 11 times average earnings, not much more than half that, brought a flood of responses, some quite rude. A disturbing number of people believe it. Let me set the record straight."
Posted by confused76 @ 10:37 PM (681 views) Add Comment
6 Comments
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1. paul said...
Again, David Smith uses statistics the way a drunk uses a lamppost.
Those figures for average and median earnings are for very select AB1 groups of people, and the higher earners' incomes have a heavy skewing effect which he chooses to completely ignore.
The published government figures for average earnings are estimated to be represent around a quarter of all adults of working age, and if he was an economist worth his salt, he'd know that already.
2. crash bandicoot said...
Why has he multiplied last years's average earnings figure by 4%? Does he think that everyone has an inflation-busting pay rise?
3. Andyh said...
His figures on govt dept as a % of GDP are also spectacularly wrong. If you go to the Nat Statistics webpage you can see that the most recent data (2006) gives a figure of 43% (to which you can then add PFI etc). I have e-mailed that to his original article, but predictably as yet they are refusing to add it as a comment. Smith really is a discgace and has given up all pretence of balanced analysis - he is Brown's creature, as is Kaletsky.
4. Andyh said...
Source of the REAL data on debt levels:
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=277
I suggest folk bombard the Times with this - it is scandalous that this guy even tries to get away with this.
5. Qetesuesi said...
I hope you chaps above have both posted accordingly to The Times. On the other hand, see the thread about their censorship....
Re. average income, two points occur to me:
(1) This is the average income of those who actually buy a house (otherwise Halifax etc. couldn't measure it). Therefore by definition it will always exclude the income of all who can't afford to, no matter how many or how poorly-paid they are.
(2) It of course includes all those phoney inflated incomes for purposes of self-cert mortgages.
6. Orwell said...
He knows he game is up but has not quite managed to sell his property portfolio yet!