jonb

Well you generally need a 25% deposit to get a buy to let mortgage. That would stop most people.

Yes they can. For example a lot of shops will refuse £50 notes which are also legal tender. Legal tender means they can't refuse it as settlement of a debt, so for example a petrol station can't refuse it, because you have filled up your tank and you a required to pay for it. However if you take stuff to the till in a shop, you are not obliged to buy it, and the shop is not obliged to sell it, so there is no debt.

And supposing they do "shut the internet"? It happened in Egypt during the dying days of Mubarak's regime. Your bitcoins will be useless. Your gold coins will be worth a lot, although silver may be better for day-to-day transactions.

It doesn't make sense in terms of tax to own a rental property in a limited company. I would advise most people to own it personally or in an LLP. If they do their own management, then having a separate management company makes sense though.

On a 30 year lease, yes.

You would have to pick the right ones. For every Microsoft or Google, there are hundreds of other companies that didn't make it, and remember that Google came along quite a bit later than most of the competitors they replaced.

Paper gold is backed by a promise made by some bank or other to deliver the actual metal or cash equivalent. If you have a bitcoin, nobody is promising to deliver anything to you.

I would go for 99.9% off the asking price, ie one month's rent as deposit.

Last time round, the telcos thought they could set up their own app stores, music stores and so on and get money from selling all that sort of stuff over 3G. While we did eventually see those sorts of things available for sale on mobile devices, the money goes to companies that don't have a 3G licence, and the telcos just get to provide the bandwidth for transmitting it. They now realise there isn't so much money to be made out of mobile internet, so that is why they bid a lot less this time round.

Correct, it was to repay the depositors. We will get our money back when the loans are repaid. They are mortgages so repayment isn't due yet. The last of them will be repaid in about 20 years from now.

If you rent from a private landlord, you have always had the "bedroom tax" if you rent too big a house. You look at the LHA rules for how many rooms you are entitled to, and then the LHA rate for that number of rooms in your area, and if your property is more expensive than that, you have to pay the difference. What has changed is that this now applies to council and housing association properties. If you have too many rooms, you have to pay for the surplus ones.

€100,000 may be a lot of money for an individual, but it isn't a lot of money for a company with salaries to pay at the end of the month.

£250k http://www.telegraph.co.uk/motoring/news/9950976/Audi-TT-takes-off-and-crashes-into-house.html

There is no way to prevent a bank run now. The damage has been done.

No it isn't the house price crash moment we've been waiting for. If people don't think cash is safe, they will convert it into other assets, and one of those might be property.

Cypriot glaziers are going to want paying in cash, and if there isn't much of it around ...

They can't, because the ATMs aren't working at the moment.

At the time of Northern Rock, it was 100% of the first £1000 an 90% of the balance up to £35k.

And if there is a bank run in other unstable countries such as Spain, Italy, France, Ireland, Greece, most of the Eastern block and so on ...?

We are half way through the month, so people might have about half of last month's salary still in the bank. That is being taxed as well.

Except you can't, because they are imposing a special bank holiday.

It is a one-off wealth tax, so no.

Some gilts are exempt from capital gains.

I think what these two statements tell us is that the arrears are covered by the deposit, so in that respect, they won't lose too much money.

It is a benefit paid to the tenant, and the amount they get paid is calculated as the lower of the actual rent they pay and the maximum amount payable based on where they live and their circumstances. The job seekers allowance or whatever other cash benefit they get paid is supposed to cover things like electricity bills, but it isn't fraud if they don't send the money to their power supplier. I don't think failure to pay rent is any different.