Fed Up

Gordo sold our gold reserves at rock-bottom prices now Mandy wants to sell our currency at rock-bottom prices too. You're always poorer with NuLabour!

EA's are full of shit. Good riddance to the bastards when they go bust.

I certainly am. It would need to be fireproof. My main concern with withdrawing all my savings is as/when the BoE changes banknote design and some go out of circulation. It would mean having to exchange the whole lot for new - equally worthless - notes.

It fecks off the government even more if you withdraw all your cash, because they can't tax you on the pittance of interest on your savings.

Sibley is entitled to his opinions and sometimes people with contrary views do get shouted down - I've decided to express my contrary view in another thread that there is no decline in the number of Polish shops or Eastern European voices where I live. A year from now when the leases for said premises have been up for renewal and ongoing building projects have been completed, things might have changed, but not yet. The problem with Sibley's view that prices will stabilise or even rise is that there isn't the money in the economy to support that. Next year is likely to see the highest recorded rises in unemployment since the early 80s. This time it will be the professional middle-classes who bear the brunt of it, particularly in the South East of England where Sibley lives. Here in the post-industrial West Midlands the economy was destroyed a long-time ago.

Well it only took Montreal 30 years. http://www.cbc.ca/canada/montreal/story/20...picstadium.html What 'special tax' will be needed here? Back to the main topic, Greece, like Spain, like Ireland cannot pull out of the Euro and devalue its currency because its debts will still have to be paid off in Euros, or US dollars or Yen or whatever - exactly the problem that the UK has only it hasn't stopped the cretins in Threadneedle Street from devaluing Sterling, thus making it more difficult for this country to pay its external debts off.

Am I allowed to say that I haven't noticed any Polish shops closing yet and that I still hear a lot of Polish or other Eastern European languages spoken when I'm about town? (I'm not being contrary for the sake of it, the main Polish shop in the centre of Coventry seems to be thriving).

I was there last Saturday week about the same time and it wasn't any busier than when I've been there before. I couldn't find any of my favourite chocolates - the heart shaped gingery ones made in Aachen I think.

So you get a great view of Selfridges then and the Rotunda. Christ, you might even be able to see Coventry from there on a clear day

Has the Jewish Chronicle mentioned this gentleman's role in the bubble? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Bernanke

Then Maidstone must be the only place in the UK where they are. Indeed, grammatically that is correct I don't know anyone 'in trouble' yet, but I do know a few reluctant landlords; couples who are planning to get married and sell off one partner's house, but are unable to do so and also unable to get enough rent to cover the mortgage of said house.

Perhaps I am being cruel but the so-called 'credit crunch' has merely acted as a catalyst in the case of certain retailers which were already in decline and/or have crap customer service. Woolies has been put out of business by Wilkos, which has expanded quite well over the past decade. MFI has been put our of business by Ikea, not least because in the latter you can buy flat packs 'off the shelf', whereas MFI decided to stop doing that and increase its display space at the expense of the warehouse space within its retail outlets. JJB and Currys meanwhile are struggling due to more discerning customers being fed up with the abysmal customer service. Good riddance to both of them when they do under.

I have a member of the West Brom for eleven years, almost as long as this rotten government has been in power. I always thought that it was a fairly good building society and I liked the idea of keeping my savings in the local (West Midlands) economy, however I learned recently that it got heavily into buy-to-let and I have found that it is more than 30% dependent on wholesale funding. With these risks you would think that it would offer a decent return on savings in its need to recapitalise. But no-siree, its variable savings rates now pay less than 3% gross. I have a 6.4% fixed-rate bond due to mature in a month's time, but after that I am clearing everything out. Then bye-bye Baggy Building Society, it was nice knowing you for the first decade, but you have betrayed my trust with irreponsible lending and you expect me to subsidise these insolvent borrowers through borrowing money from me at negative real interest rates.

I would say that the obvious thing to do now is to buy a good quality personal safe and withdraw ALL your savings in £20 notes and keep it in there. Screw the banks and Nationwide. Why should we capitalise them for such poor returns?

Except that other bankrupt island to the west of us http://www.irishhometruths.com/ but at least savers can still keep their money in Deutsch Francs.

With Woolies dying, where are all the trainee shoplifters going to do their apprenticeships now? The pick 'n' mix was the first module of the Shoplifting NVQ.

What I don't understand is that as Sterling is devalued, how can the banks afford to pay back their non-Sterling debts without raising their own Sterling mortgage rates to make up for the shortfall? Taxpayer bailouts of the banks, ie socialising the debts, seem to be the only way, but these bailouts just devalue Sterling further meaning more are needed until the currency used for the bailout, ie Sterling, becomes so worthless that it is of no use to the banks to pay off their debts in US dollars, Euros, Yen etc. The only thing they then do is to repossess the assets on which those debts are secured, then sell to overseas investors, but which overseas investor would want to buy an asset which is losing at least 10% of its Sterling value (or at least 20% of its non-Sterling value) per annum?

I posted this on the News Blog this morning, but I don't know why I bothered. Typical of this site is that they didn't even bother with it. This place really is a waste of time. Feck it, I've had enough.

By-laws are local things, but I think you'll find that it is increasingly common for one property to now be marketed via more than one estate agent.

That depends whether the property is a home or viewed as an 'investment'. If it is a home with a view to trading up, they would be better off waiting until the market falls across the board, assuming their domestic circumstances allow. Contrary to the media hysteria, most homeowners aren't bothered about price falls unless they are planning to downsize.

I suppose that 80% depends on what cost-base you are using. Let's assume that a typical FTB propertiy, which to my mind means a standard utilitarian Bryant / Beazer / Barratt / Bovis 2-bedroomed modern 'rabbit-hutch' terraced house, falls to a price level of 3.5 x salary + 10% deposit. In the Midlands that would mean prices falling by 40% to 50%. In the Thames Valley you'd be looking at drops of 60%+, bearing in mind that average salaries down there are greater. On the south coast, assuming that all the second-home owners bailing out leads to more onerous general market drops, prices would fall even further.

What I am seeing a lot of are houses with two or three 'For Sale' boards outside meaning that a lot of EAs must have dropped their 'single agency' clauses meaning that they realise that they are all in it together - or all in the sh!t together, depending on how you look at it.

A really good recession will reduce the demand for imported mod-cons, the things that this country used to have the manufacturing capability for itself. Not only that but as the Chinese are putting prices up, these goods will be even less attractive. A really really good recession will encourage net emigration, which itself will reduce the demand for food and fuel and hence help to redress the balance of payments deficit.

A similar hypothesis exists regarding confectionery, with small treats becoming more popular at the expense of larger consumables. More Mars Bars, less plasma screens.

Waning confidence in the BoE's inflation-fighting credibility could speed the pound's decline Then put the bleedin' base rate back to where it was 6 months ago for a start.