Methinkshe

Bubble curves are exponential on the way up, aren't they? If so, would we expect a mirror-image exponential curve when the bubble bursts? That would mean an initial very rapid unwinding, wouldn't it?

Yup, it's pretty depressing, isn't it? Next time I need to replace my sofa (and they only last for 5 years and then if you're lucky) instead of buying new I'm thinking of revamping my parents' 3 pce suite (if mother goes ahead and downsizes) which was bought in 1951 and is Utility Furniture (furniture was still rationed) but has lasted for 50+ years and if re-upholstered will probably last for another 50 years.

There are, of course, many diligent postmen and I salute their endeavours. And perhaps you are correct when you suggest that it is the temps and the badly trained who let down the side. I would add to that sector, those who for whatever reason do not have a vested interest in this country and the continuance of its institutions, or who have never acquired through home or school a personal morality and therefore do not feel compelled to perform their duties to 100% of their ability but are only interested in getting as much money for as little work as possible. But they exist throughout society - it's just that they seem to be becoming more numerous. I met a few examples in a hospital recently; night-nurses were disappearing into a side room with pillows and duvets to spend most of the night asleep; calls from patients were considered an interruption and responded to with downright rudeness verging on cruelty.

I thought it was common knowledge that there are postmen who are less than conscientious when it comes to delivering mail. Occasionally there are prosecutions, but that's only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to lazy postmen dumping half the contents of their mail sack in any convenient tipping place. Especially the junk mail - they know most people hate receiving it and don't think twice before off-loading most of it, even though that's how they are supposed to earn their bonuses, and someone has paid good money for the mailshot. I once helped one of my daughters clear out a flat she shared where one of the other tenants was a postman. He'd done a bunk. Found piles and piles of undelivered mail in his room. He'd told my daughter that it was common practice at his sorting office to not deliver mail if they couldn't be bothered or were running late or the round was especially heavy. Can you believe that in Viuctorian times, before the days of the motor car and when letter writing was the main form of distant communication, there were FOUR deliveries a day and a letter posted in the morning could arrive in the afternoon!

Isn't the necessity for growth the other side of the coin of running a little bit of inflation?

What's wrong with Imperial Units? Is the mental arithmetic required to use them too difficult for you? Metric is to Imperial as eating frogs' legs is to eating roast beef - uncivilised and uncultured!!

I agree. So what kind of system would work better? I've always had a sneaky admiration for the system described in the O.T. Every 50th year was a Jubilee, where all land that may have temporarily been lost to its owners through hardship, had to be returned. In other words, creditors could only have a 49 yr lease on a brother Israelite's property.

From Robert Beckman's book, Crashes. Credit - Without Which Crashes Would Not Be Possible Credit is the genesis of all crashes. By borrowing money you can make limited resources perform feats which are limited only by the amount you can borrow. Credit is the lifeblood of any boom. Easy credit is the harbinger of manias. In mid-1988 I saw an ad in a newspaper which exemplifies the crazy era of easy credit in which we live. "Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!" the ad said. "Now you can borrow all you need to get completely out of debt!"

I agree and sympathise with you. I'm in my mid-fifties and it was much easier for me when I was in my late teens and early twenties than it is for my children of that age. I could afford to buy a house with my husband when I was 18 and he was 23 and when neither of us was on much more than the minimum wage of the day. And 4 years later, I could afford to give up work to have children (not returned since) while my husband supported me. We may not have had ALL the gadgets that are available now, and we certainly managed with secondhand furniture or stuff donated by kindly relatives, but I had a nice new cooker, fridge-freezer, washing machine, a 3-bed mid-terrace with small graden and garage, and we could afford to go to the pub twice a week. My kids can barely afford to move out of home and when they do it's to a bed-sit - a single room and shared kitchen and bathroom facilities, and even that costs £70-£80 per week here in Cornwall where the average wage for a 25 year old is about 15K and nobody can work unless they own a car - public transport is once a week on market day from most villages. We had it good - no tuition fees and student loans - just LA grants; affordable houses, one overseas holiday a year, and all on what would now be minimum wage level. I can only apologise to the succeeding generations for the mess my generation has made of it for you.

Johnny-come-latelys - last in, first out. They're the ones that will suffer most, whether they be in France, Spain or even in the UK. Twenty years ago my sister and her husband upped sticks and moved to Spain. Bought a large Farm and spent the next 18 years raising pigs, then sold out to a property developer for millions. Bet the property developer is regretting buying the place, now; he's not developed it yet and by the looks of the housing market in Spain, he won't be doing so for at least another 20 years.

A widening gap between the haves and haves not is a sure sign of a bubble about to burst (Robert Beckman in his book CRASHES describes the phenomenon.) What galls me is that the city boys make pretend money out of nothing - i.e. by placing bets via shuffling figures) and then take their funny money in the form of bonuses and turn it into real wealth by purchasing the labour of others. Meanwhile, the labourers watch their small stashes of earned wealth in Pension Funds etc being turned into funny money by these same guys.

Good post. The positive feedback loop has been mentioned before on this site - think it may have been by Dr Bubb. Will there be a similar positive feedback loop on the way down? I tend to think there will be. Here's a useful definition. Positive and Negative Loops Closed systems are controlled by two types of feedback loops: positive loops and negative loops. Positive loops portray self-reinforcing processes wherein an action creates a result that generates more of the action, and hence more of the result. Anything that can be described as a vicious or virtuous circle can be classified as a positive feedback process. Generally speaking, positive feedback processes destabilize systems and cause them to "run away" from their current position. Thus, they are responsible for the growth or decline of systems, although they can occasionally work to stabilize them. Negative feedback loops, on the other hand, describe goal-seeking processes that generate actions aimed at moving a system toward, or keeping a system at, a desired state. Generally speaking, negative feedback processes stabilize systems, although they can occasionally destabilize them by causing them to oscillate.

I'm using Nationwide on the basis that it's the only Building Socity left that hasn't turned itself into a bank and gorged on CDOs. Good to hear that they are exercising some control as far as youngsters are concerned, although I can understand how frustrating it must be for her not to be able to shop online.

Worrying anecdote. Now there is no longer a societal taboo on debt and bankrupts, there are those who will consider bankruptcy as a means of shedding debt "a human right". I get the feeling that there will be so many people declaring banruptcy and walking away from their debts that either the rules will have to be tightened and some stigma reattached through stricter and longer lasting penalties, or we'll all have to join in and go bankrupt unless we want to end up paying for the profligate - the money has to come from somewhere and it would appear that the prudent will be the ones who pick up the tab.

Yeah, that's what you thought. Unfortunately, the likes of me have been predicting a global financial implosion for at least a decade - we looked at the debt and couldn't believe easy money could further inflate the credit bubble ...it was to the mind of oldies like me beyond the bound of sensible government and straying into the downright irresponsible, and one doesn't expect that those who purport to run countries could ever be so charged. However, following the Greenspan put and like manoeuvres from other central banks, I have changed my mind and I now believe that those in government will do ANYTHING to save their rotten skins, which is why I believe that although deflation is the obvious cure for our current woes, given even half of a half of a half per cent chance, our self-seeking governors will go for that and the inflation that will inevitably ensue. In other words, I have totally lost faith with government of whatever hue..

......talk about crawling out of the woodwork! All these "lurkers" turned members who have apparently been hanging around since 2004 and now offer a timid opinion that they don't think house prices will fall very much. Okay guys, I defer to you ... I've only been a member here for three months, but at least I joined before the bleeding obvious! You lot have just about caught up with it and now want to protest that you've always been here, and all along you believed in a HPC but just a little bit of a one, and now aren't we overdoing it.... Okay, I may be a newcomer, but you're going to have to have a lot more interesting stuff to say than just bleat about how you've been looking for 3 years and only now have decided to respond in a wish-washy sort of way bfore I take any notice of your posts. Merry Christmas.

Perhaps you oldies have just neglected to move with the times. Your thinking sounds a little 2004ish to me. Get with it, catch up and don't berate others who have either stuck with the site or joined later. Personally I just think you are SO yesterday...... When did you last stare in the face a CDO or an SIV or a CDS? Get with it!

I think you're wrong, there, Injin. Targets have to do with presenting statistics that can fool the electorate. I wouldn't even credit targets with having made an analysis of deaths v loss/benefit to the state. It's so much more to do with spin. All that targets do is set an outcome that the statisticians can spin towards. It's like setting an equation: y = n + x p - u all divided by wishful thinking = whatever makes the government look good. And where y and n and x and p can be whatever I want them to be. Talk about Alice in Wonderland!

Goring and Ferring good in parts - Ferring more so than Goring, but Littlehampton is a definite no-no address. I actually bought my first house back in 1971 in Goring, but not in one of the better locations. If I were moving back there now, I'd avoid it.

This man speaks sense. I've been reading his blog for several months. It's a lifesaver for dummies like me who know precious little about finance but are astute enough in the top storey to recognise when things have got out of hand. I recommend it to ALL who visit this site...especially those like me who are the financially unwashed, to use Robert Beckman's terminology!

I know what you're saying...one of my daughters did a few years in the Police....I've kinda got the inside story. Targets are the real bugger... they distort all attempts by the police TO police. If you are below targets one month, go and cop some motorists - easy crime solving. Targets are that daft that catching and prosecuting a speeding motorist is, as far as targets are concerned, a crime solved, just the same as catching and prosecuting a burglar. But guess which is easier??!!

Woof-woof all, to be frank. Just a knee-jerk bit of woffle on the part of govenment. Didn't make anyone safer. Just added another silly non-reg for the police to police, just like the anti-huntng legislation. What really gets my goat is that I know that if I called the police to an incident where I felt anti-hunting laws were being flouted, they'd be there in an instant. Yet, a few months ago I called the police because my son's work van had been totally trashed - off road in our private farm drive where someone would have to know his address, but all they did was give us a crime number - i.e. its an insurance problem not a criminal one.

I agree to a point, and thanks for your gracious response. However, I do not believe that house prices exist in isolation. The fact is that they are dictated by many interacting forces and even when a thread starts discussing gun laws, that doesn't mean that house prices have been laid aside. What is or is not allowed in a society, what is or is not perpetuated via subtle means, can all have an effect on the value of assets, especially house prices. Sentiment - that ethereal substance that drives and controls markets - is affected by these apparently extraneous matters that we are presently discussing. Please, don't make the mistake of believing that just because a thread doesn't specifically mention houses prices it doesn't have a bearing. A wide economic and political understanding is essential to even beginning to understand which way house prices will go. Which is why I value this forum. I would soon pick up my keyboard and walk if this site ever began to put off-topic such threads as this one. If for no other reason than it would be incredibly broing just to discuss house prices in the narrowest sense. It is only in the wider sense - house prices as a symptom of...whatever...that the subject is worth discussing, never mind a whole site devoted to the subject.

For starters, stay away from east Worthing. West is better. But there are still pockets in west Worthing that are either desirable or not so desirable. Give me some addresses and I'll tell you.

Why should that be the case? You are ASSUMING irresponsibility. You may just as well argue that because I object, I throw a punch. Well, yes, there is a certain strata of society that will do. But must we always defer to the lowest common denominator? I prefer to think in terms of every householder having a gun that can legally be used in self-defence. Doesn't half keep a government on its toes, I can tell you! Perhaps they are a much more controlled society BECAUSE they have always retained guns. And don't quote US stats at me without looking at comparative population sizes. Again, I say, does a society legislate for the paranoid schizo or for the majority of balanced citizens? LCD again.