Wednesday, Feb 03, 2010
An old style HPC protest at our national obsession
Compass: The British housing disaster continues reports Rob Williams
No direct mention of interest rates or Central banks: "According to the latest survey from the Nationwide Building Society, the average UK house price rose by 1.2% in January, pushing the annual rate up to 8.6%. Even taking the latest figures with a large pinch of salt - the figures are based on what are historically low levels of transactions - it is obvious that the much needed readjustment in house prices has not happened. House prices should have crashed in 2007, following the longest, largest and most expensive credit boom in history."
Posted by quiet guy @ 09:57 PM (566 views) Add Comment
4 Comments
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1. dbc reed said...
A good left-wing account of how things stand.But Compass has LVT sympathies.Why no mention?(Stop groaning at the back.We land taxers would love to stop going on about it) Also lefties should be on message to the main point:that young workers are saddled with 100k of debt for land under where they live: how are they supposed to be intentionally competitive? The international competition for jobs boils down to who lives on the cheapest residential land.
2. Mnkybusiness said...
"The international competition for jobs boils down to who lives on the cheapest residential land."
On that basis UK residential land must be the 10th cheapest in the EU, since the UK's unemployment rate is the 10th lowest! Somehow I don't think that there is a strong link between the cost of land and competition for jobs.
3. mark wadsworth said...
As DBC says, Compass are mildly pro-LVT (so I will forgive them most of their other knee-jerk lefty nonsense).
4. mark wadsworth said...
@ Mnky, nope. International comparisons on unemployment are nigh impossible as every govt fudges them, puts people on IB, "training" of pseudo jobs in public sector.
And there is some truth in what DCB says (although it's cause and effect?). It is certainly true that a high cost of commercial premises means that supply is unduly restricted; and if supply of commercial premises is restricted then almost by definition, there is artifical unemployment. But better than losing a few square miles of the hallowed greenbelt, eh?
Similarly, as wages tend to equalise across borders, given the choice, you'd rather live where land is cheaper to boost your net disposable income. i.e. if you are prepared to pay £10,000 a year to somebody to make cars, in Poland they'd be queuing up for it; in London you'd get very few takers. The price of land increases the wages that employers have to pay etc.