Ah-so

Bulgaria is poor and outside of the EU. Other than that, I know about as much as the next man. I would be careful about buying there for "investment" purposes unless you know exactly what you are doing. Prices are rising rapidly, but do not let greed get the better of you.

No, but know some people who would like to leave. I think it ranks above Catford and Thornton Heath. Personal body armour is not required in daylight during school hours.

Property Guru is: Uniformed, Ill-educated, Semi-literate Attention-seeking, Childish, Desperate, Unable to face reality. PG must be an estate agent!

One set of numbers, 2 different interpretations! The fall figure has been widely reported, so the headline of "Fall of 0.6%, biggest for 10 years" should get a lot of people to sit up and take note. The BBC is still clearly the gimp of the property industry, with the headline "House prices 'see soft landing'." http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4396061.stm I wonder if their unwillingness to run negative stories has anything to do with the forthcoming election?

As you say, it's an inexact science. A case of all of the people some of time or some of the people all of the time, but not all of the people all of the time. I rememer reading an economics textbook at uni where the author simply that unemployment was solved, case closed. He was writing in 1970. Through the 50s and 60s a new paradigm of sorts had been achieved. The problem with each paradigm is that they fall apart. Keynesianism was the standard for the post-war period, and the proponent of the idea that economies could be managed, not just observed, by tinkering at the edges. It did work for bit. His theories were abused, but he did originate a new paradigm. Things have been ticking along quite nicely in the UK, apart from personal debt, which has ballooned and we are in an asset bubble were it is impossible to buy a house. These are the cracks the new paradigm. (Oh, and we don't make anything anymore! )

If they have agreed to put forward 5k, then they are desperate. Milk it. Offer lower. In bad times, cash flow is more important than profit. If they need cash to to pay bills, they will not care where it comes from. It still sounds a lot for E Yorkshire, though am no expert on the region.

Good points and I will take them on board. To take you up on a couple of points, I do believe that labour is as mobile on an international level as it was 200 yrs ago domestically. London bustles with foreigners. The EU means that anyone can live anywhere. English has become an international lingua Franca, useable anywhere with at least someone. I have worked abroad and have married a foreigner. This, like it or not, is the reality. The old moving from Leeds to London is now Bratislava to London or London to Hong Kong. And as for money, international capital markets are very efficient at moving money from currency to currency and across the world. I would rather move money from Tokyo to London today than move money from Leeds to London 200 yrs ago (or anywhere in the UK after dark) I was not being entirely truthful about Switzerland. In addition to banks, there are plenty of farms and a high-tech engineering industry. And our economy is still about 20% based in manufacturing. It will continue, but in fields where we can compete, not where we cannot.

Purpose built block of flats, basically, usually built out of brick. far more desirable than conversion flats. My heart bleeds for him. Only getting an offer 30k (10%) below asking.

Mr Brown told us that we would say goodbye to Mr Boom and Mr Bust. Under this government, Mr Boom has come back in a big way, so if government policy could not keep him out of the way, what chance is there of avoiding the unpredictable and violent Mr Bust? Put another way, you believe that the 1% policy is possible and intended. Was the 20% year on year growth also intended? If the "micro" economic methods (don't you mean macro?) are so accurate, we must conclude so. Thank you Mr Brown for intentionally pricing a generation out of housing. I must have missed that bit in your manifesto.

What a juicy topic! First of all, Switzerland is not a manufacturing economy, never has been, but manages to scrape by. This obsession with manufacturing, or rather the belief that an economy without manufacturing is nothing more than people moving bits of paper around for ever higher values is nonsense. What we are seeing is very old fashioned economics on a global scale. Let's use Britain 200 years ago. Particularly helpful as it was the first modern economy. The process can be used in area at almost any different time. The economy was based on agriculture, priducing food and wool. Then there were the mining industries, found wherever there were the materials. There were other centres that converted these raw materials into finished products. In towns there were shops and small banks. In cities there was less reliance on manufacturing, and more on services. London was the most based on the service sector, with a massive financial district and everything else to offfer. While Britain was a major trading nation at this time, the point is that what existed on a national level is now global. The UK is service driven and thus its equivalent would have been London. The East is now a manufacturing centre, its parrallel being Manchester or Leeds. Just as every hundred of every county always had a market town, the UK is Europe's market town. Fencedancer asked earlier "Has anybody wondered how we manage to stay in the top few economies in the world, bearing in mind our size and the fact we have virtually no production capacity left?" I think you answered your own question! Did London ever take on Manchester at manufacturing? No, it did what it did best. The only guaranteed way to reduce the size of the economy is to return to manufacturing.

Tedious, unpleasant and vacuous. That's an adjective for every day he has been a member.

Agreed. Prices are nothing more than supply and demand. The thing we can do is not add demand (already happening). The supply will follow (already happenin). The VIs can add positive spin, but they cannot increase the affordibility of property or the yields on BTLs. Most of what I read in the papers is now bearish, other than the odd reprinted press release.

Actually I've done some crystal ball gazing and by 2015 no one in Britain will have a job a at all, except for taxi drivers taking Chinese tourists to the airport, hotel and restaurant workers for said Chinese (foreigners anyway). There will only be 10 other jobs, 5 of which will be estate agents and the other 5 insurance sales. The president of China will have renamed himself "The Emporer" and the Chinese will be so rich that they control the entire world's manufacturing output, aided and abetted by Darth Delhi. I know this will happen, because exactly the same thing happened when Japan realised that they too could manufacture electronic goods, only cheaper. 中国日本ã®ãƒ‘ニック。

I see that 2 blocks have already been taken by housing associations, which could mean the "city lifestyle" could take on an extra edge. Pursuing this track, add 10 years on to the buildings (squinting helps!) and the deterioration that will follow with the shoddy building standards, and what do you get? A pretty good resemblence of a council estate. Then imagine the BTLs cannot let to anyone but the council, coupled with the fact that the kids from the housing association flats will have nothing to do but mess around after school in the roads, things could go down hill pretty quickly. I bet they want about 170,000 for these. They could be woth less than half that in a decade.

My interpretation of the article is that it will be for personal pensions (SIPPS) only. I do not think that the big fund managers will be getting in on the act and they probably would not want to. As far as I know, you cannot actually borrow money within a pension, so I think it unlikely that many of us will afford to get on the pension property ladder. Only those with large SIPPs will be able to do it, which still is not a very large number. Also, you are forced to buy an annuity at 75 (very odd Brown legislation), which would mean the sale of the property. The pension funds already charge a whacking great commission on the securities they own and it is really easy to value shares for an annual management fee, unlike property. Any increase in property values seems very unlikely considering how small the potential number of investors.

No, I do not know the complexities of manufacture. And I think it is great that stuff is make in China because it is work for them and cheaper PCs for us. My point is that a lot of the posters are very dewy eyed about the fact that we do not produce everything on this island, when obviously we cannot compete in manufacturing with the far east. If for some reason China imposed a trade imbargo on the EU or we went to war, or it invaded Taiwan, we would get by, as we have always managed to do. The PCs would get made somewhere else, as demand will inevitably lead to supply. In the short term other viable factories will work to full capacity and prices would rocket, and we would hang on to our existing PCs for longer, but the production capacity will be replaced. It is a theoretical situation, so a bit silly to argue over, but in an economy resources are directed where they are most efficiently used. If that option is not viable, then it will move to the 2nd most efficient.

When the yuan floats, it will increase the cost of imports from China (prepared to be shocked by having to shell out 40 quid for a DVD player!) and make China less competitive to its neighbours. Prepare then for the 19 pound Vietnamese DVD player. The China will also be able to afford more Western luxury goods with the stronger yuan. More Jonny Walker all lound?

I have worked in the finance side of the consumer electronics industry, for a manufacturing company as it happens. The month was an exaggeration to illustrate a point. If the EU could not access imported computer hardware from the far east, the facilities to do would be built pretty damn quickly, due to the enormous need, most likely in the new EU states of Eastern Europe. True, it might add to the overall cost of a PC - Czech labour, cheap as it is, is more expensive than Chinese. Perhaps a new PC will go from GBP 400 to 500. We would get by. In the meantime, who would the Chinese sell their product to?

You can if you can afford Twickenham!

I appreciate your concerns, but we are no longer going tobe a viable manufacturing nation. The EU is pretty much entirely self-sufficient in food, largely due to CAP, which keeps the world's poor poor. The Cech Republic (EU) is a growing manufacturing centre. They make all the tv's for Panasonic, moved from Cardiff. We make more than enough cars and high tech stuff. Britain cannot be self-sufficient, just as no one could expect Wales to be, but Europe can be and would survive some doomsday "yellow peril" type disaster that I suspect is an unstated fear. China needs us more than we need them. If China stopped selling the west motherboards, we would manufacture them here within a month. If we stopped buying from them, they would be stuffed. Anyway, what's the big deal about self-sufficiency and manufacturing? Seems to hark back to different era.

Especially as most of these flats are piles of junk. They are made out of wood and plaster. The best built bit of them are the fire doors. After 4 years the age shows worse than a car!

Quite right. I have no seen the latest hometrack press release, but think it would be 50% word for word the same. "Average prices fell by 0.1%" "As a result, any discounts being negotiated on asking prices have dropped." We know that asking prices have been rising quite fast (Rightmove), so if agreed sales prices have dropped 0.1%, the discounts being negotiated must have increased! Since the source is estate agency data, I don't think any of it is trustworthy.

You are right, but my feeling is that the whole culture of buying pre-recorded films really became widespread with the release of DVDs. I put this down to them a) being smaller and we have more disposable income than 6 years ago. I constantly hear people wittering on about buying a box set of this or that or buying new releases rather than renting. It's a massive con - no one really watches them more than once or twice and they still clutter the place up. Then the films get shown on tv. Sometime ago, the Matrix was shown on tv. I recorded it and then worte "The Matrix" on the label. I never watched it, but the next time it was on tv, I watched it on channel 5. I still have not watched the video, probably never will. I may be wrong, but I think that the proportion of the national income spent of pre-recorded video is now far higher than before the release of the DVD format. Since the companies can knock out a DVD for pennies, a 6 quid "bargain" is all profit (excluding cost of sales). Does anyone else agree with this? The pre-recorded buy market is no longer the martket of film buffs and Star Trek fans. If we are looking for a profligate, consumerist society, the unecessary purchase of DVD titles seems a pretty good sympton. How were we suckered in to this?

Cassandra, By "we" do you mean Britain or "the West". The loss of manufacturing is the "biggest threat" to who? How if the City produces nothing of value, is it our greatest exporter? What is it of value that "has already gone"? Should we emigrate en masse to the far east or plant carrots in the back garden? Please enlighte me.

More evidence that it is greed that makes you poor, not wealthy. It is another sign of market madness when people really believed that they could get a profit from investing 225k in a poorly built 2 bedroom flat in a dump like Strartford. Did he really think that someone would pay him a grand a month for laminate flooring?