MrPants

I'm very bullish on gold and miners medium/long term, and have been quietly accumulating both for last 8 months, or so but I think you're right. There's new lows ahead. I hope so anyway as I've not finished buying.

Blockchain.info are not accepting sterling at the moment. Too many people like me trying to buy before it breaks through $100 I expect. I'll wait for a pullback and go buy in cash I think.

Is there a way to buy them easily and/or anonymously? I have to say I think there's a very high chance the state will find some way to shut down this threat to their fiat power, but in the unlikely event they can't manage it, it might be worth owning a handful as a bit of a punt.

Amazing quotes. Cant believe they've been so open about it in the past.

When leaving a tenancy agreement on less than good terms, am I right in thinking that landlords do not have the right to pass information onto Experian etc unless you specifically gave them that right in your rental contract? Presumably any threat by them to do so is a bluff, as if they did you could sue them for consequential loss?

I bet the govt backdown on this.

With printy printy bond yields can be anything Bernanke wants them to be.

Some friends of mine are relocating from the North West to the South East for family reasons. They bought a very nice city centre flat in Manchester two years ago. They don't want to sell now as they would make a loss (they'd still have plenty of equity though). They've just last week let it out 'for a couple of years until the market recovers'. Very silly in my opinion but it's their choice.

BTL investors can claim back the interest element of their mortgage repayment but not any capital repayment element. This works well if inflation is zero, and hence the nominal interest rate = real interest rate. In reality however inflation >0 therefore the real interest rate is lower than the nominal rate and the BTL investor can effectively claim tax relief on capital repayments. The solution would be to only offer tax on the real interest payed, i.e. the nominal interest rate minus RPI.

KingBingo has a point, there's never a time here on HPC when big falls aren't 'just round the corner'. I've been postponing and postponing my purchase for 4 years now, even though the clock is against me. Now as I finally start to gear up for buying, it looks like decent falls may soon be here for real, but the thing is even if they are the govt will just do whatever is necessary to preserve nominal prices, no matter how unfair and how ruinous the cost in the long run. It's not a fair game. Better to find out who is in charge and line up with their interests rather than maintain the illusion that we live in a free capitalist society where market forces are allowed to determine outcomes. That will just leave you on the side of those who may well be right, but are also robbed blind by the men with all the guns.

Stalemate for me. Every time it looks like decent nominal falls are coming, there's just more printy printy. That won't change. The vested interests are too powerful and reckless. Will mega inflation follow the printing? Yes, eventually, but it will take years as transmission methods are jammed.

Great info. Thanks all. I'm going to check and see if the deposit was put back in any of the schemes.

Hello, Here's the relevant facts: 1) I have been in a rental flat for the last three and a half years waiting for the house prices to approach reasonable levels. 2) I am likely to buy in the next 12 months (losing faith in a nominal HPC/turning 40/been in rentsl for 20 years) 3) I will need a mortgage of up to 50% LTV 4) The flat has terrible problems from noisy neighbours for the last 12 months. These are ongoing. Various efforts to resolve this have all been inneffective 5) When I moved in the flat was brand new. The letting agents refused to acknowledge my repeated requests for an inventory. 6) I paid a deposit of 1 months rent when I moved. This was initally kept in a deposit scheme but then I receieved a letter last year saying it was no longer in that scheme. I received no notification of it having been placed into another scheme. 7) When I have argued with the letting agents over the noise problem I have quoted my right to 'quiet enjoyment' of the property and said that they are breaching that by letting the flat underneath to very noisy people. I made a threat to withhold a quarter of rent until the noise problem was resolved. I have yet to follow through on this as i) I don't want to move just yet and ii) I fear it may harm my credit rating. 8) The letting agent seems ineffective in it's attempts to deal with, or evict, noisy tenants. What I am considering: 1) I have already decided I am not going to not pay my last months rent to ensure that I do not lose my deposit. I doubt the letting agent's good faith in this matter and whilst I would be in a strong legal position to get my desposit back I'd rather just skip a month's rent and save myself all the fuss. 2) If I am doing this why not go the whole hog and skip say the last two months rent so I actually get some small compensation for the reduced utility of the flat due to noisy neighbours? So I guess my questions are: 1) Can not paying rent impact my credit rating and hence my ability to get a mortgage? 2) Can the landlord really do anything if I skip the last two menths rent? Im buying a house so it's not as if I need a reference. 3) Should I tell the landlord what I'm doing and why or just ignore all communication from them until I leave (I suspect the latter option may be the better one).

I have been pushing back my intended time to buy a property from my initial estimate of late 2009 to, 2010, 2011 and now late 2012. This one I will stick with. I'd like to think prices will be falling by then and I can make really low offers but somehow I doubt it. The next fall in nominal prices is aways just a few months ahead and never actually arrives (in nominal terms). This site is reminiscent of a cult in that regard where one failed doomsday prediction is merely updated with the next. This govt (and the last one) are determined to pay whatever crazy price is necessary to prevent any sudden drop in nominal prices. House prices are clearly overvalued and will fall in real terms but this could take so long measured against the limited human lifespan that unless you are still young this infomation is of little use. I'd like to be wrong on this but it seems to me that rather than living in rented for another 10 years (I've done 20 already, I'm nearly 40 years old and I've never been allowed to put up a picture) I may as well buy soon and lock in the low mortgage rates available for as long as I can before the bond bubble bursts. Not as good as actual house prices falling but a better second best than waiting in crappy short term rentals for a long, slow gradual real terms decline. I had been hoping that the break-up of the euro and multiple soveriegn defaults, plus the banking mayhem that will inevitably follow, will give one more big deflationary push to the economy and me a perfect buying window. It is a similar story here though. I expected all this to happen in 2010. It hasn't happened yet. Governments have a lot of power to kick the can down the road for a very long time. Meanwhile I get older. Knowing that this will eventually happen is of no real use to me.

I think there's a better than 50/50 chance Santander will go bust when Spain leaves the Euro Zone. I am currently in the process of transferring £25K of ISAs into them though. As they are financially distressed they are paying good rates. The govt are stupid and wasteful enough to underwrite them, so I'm happy to put money in up to the £85K limit. I also put money into Kaupthing 12 months before they went down to get their great rates. I wasn't remotely surprised when they collapsed. Kaupthing's UK accounts were just moved to another bank (ING in this instance), the same will happen here I expect. Worst case scenario is they are liquidated and I have to wait a bit for my money via a claims procedure or some such. I could live with that and the funds would still be earning good interest. Don't get me wrong, governments shouldn't wasting money (printed or not) on this sort of nonsense, but if they are playing that game I will take my turn and try to make back a small portion of the money they steal from me every year.

Sheffield City Centre is horrible to drive in, the worst in the country (and I drive 60k miles a year so I see a lot of town centres). It is difficult never to drive in a bus lane there unless you know the roads very well. There is one car park in the centre of town where for a period over Xmas there were only two ways out 1) the bus lane or 2) do a u-turn in a no u-turn area. Pick your crime, or stay there forever. I expect they'll make a lot of money.

EDM - Great to have you back. I'd be very interested in your big picture opinion of where we currently stand.

Thank you. A valuable counter weight to their debate. Interesting to weigh all the facts before deciding what to do in response to governments' money printing foolishness.

Just jumping in to take advantage of some of the knowledgable people on this thread... I drive 50,000+ miles per year (self employed) and need a new (reliable, cheap to run) car. A couple of colleagues recommended Skoda Octavia 1.9 Diesels as cars that give good mpg and can be reasonably expected to run for 200,000+ miles. Would you agree with that? If so what's a good target price for one that's say a couple of years old with 20000 miles on the clock? I saw an 08 Elegance today with 25k on it listed at 10,500 which seemed reasonable (though I'd hope to get it for less than 10000), does that seem a good buy? Thanks.

A mortgage broker's blog I keep an eye on. http://www.secretdiaryofamortgagebroker.blogspot.com/ More crazy lending on the way it seems. Very annoying.

On HPC we tend to assume that forced sellers (Death, Debt, Divorce) will always set prices at the margin and means that prices eventually fall no matter how stubborn sellers are. However I think there may be a problem with this analysis. The three D's do indeed give us a fixed, price insensitive supply (thought the debt element is kept to a minimum by low interest rates and daft mortgage interest paying schemes), but this is not the whole story. I think there is also a price insensitive element to demand, and this is is the reason we haven't seen the falls we hoped for so far and may not until interest rates bring about a large volume of forced sellers. This element of demand comes from a mix of the cash rich, high earners, the stupid, and those wanting to buy a house to have kids. I know people on HPC say you don't need to buy a house to breed, but having been in rentals for 20 years I have had to move against my wishes many times and would never bring up a kid in such an unstable environment. What matters for prices is not that there exists a price insensitive element of supply but it's relative size compared to the price insensitive element of demand. At the moment they are not wildly out of whack so I fear the falls will ony be gradual.

I'm watching the cheaper bits of Sutton/better bits of Erdington. Increased supply over last six months. Quite a few price cuts. Lots of people still asking 120K for crappy two bed flats though. Better priced ones are shifting.

I don't see the need for all this employment protection legislation and the attendant circus of lawyers, tribunals etc. Jst seems like a lot of unnecessary waste, burdens on business and disincentives for employers to hire new staff. Surely if you no longer want someone to work for you that's all the justification you need to stop hiring them, in the same way as they can choose to leave your company and work elsewhere if they feel they'd be better off that way. There's no need for the State to be involved in this decision. It's a bit like Asda trying to sue me if I started shopping at Tescos instead.

I take it this has been delayed.

Wasn't the prediction that he got hounded for that there would be a big stimulus induced stock market rally? If so, he was right.