thehowler

Yeah, but he's thinking about England.

Apparently the SNP "don't want the country to exist." Not like he's being alarmist.

It reminded me of Norman Wisdom, "but Mr Grimshaw, I've got the paper." Breathtakingly weak. And some of the lines coming out now are choice. "That's the problem with coalition, we didn't quite win the election." Uh huh.

Wales and North East took quite a hit, they might have soaked up a lot of the 0.8% national drop. Hammersmith and Fulham not shifting though, 0.0%, no evidence for a coming crash there. It's sitzkrieg until we get an event or a real change in policy.

So... Kensington and Chelsea tanks 1.6% Sales volumes have taken a big hit BUT London is up 0.2% overall. Not seeing that big lurch down in prices and we're more than a third into the year. If the Tories get back in and we lose the faint impetus of mansion tax/rent controls etc I'd say there's a good chance prices will start to pick up again.

I think we skipped 3 and 4 and moved swiftly to no.5.

So where are we in the recessionary cycle - or are such things no longer relevant in the new normal? It used to be: RECESSION... Year 1. Streamlined/starved companies and construction/retail gradually shuffle into life Year 2. More jobs created Year 3. Growing confidence, people spending more Year 4. Salaries/prices rising, inflation suddenly kicks in Year 5. Bloated companies start to crash, unemployment, retail tanks... RECESSION

I assume it's heavily seasonally-adjusted too - but how do they keep getting caught out by the "ooh, it's cold outside" Q1 flop? Can't see them lifting myself, it would take vision and daring, but I guess they'll be getting jitters about the presidential year coming up. They'll want to squeeze a lift in before the recession hits...

Recession before Christmas?

US recovery roaring away...not. Just 0.2% growth first quarter. Cue a cautious Fed statement today, rates not going anywhere this year.

The poll, which was carried out by Kapa Research and is to be published in Sunday’s To Vima newspaper, found that 71.9 percent want an agreement with Greece’s creditors, against 23.2 percent who said the government should refuse any compromise. Looks like the Greek demos has no appetite for default, they want more fudge. Given all the easy money sloshing about from the ECB, all that's required is a face-saving compromise and the show can roll on for a few more years. Suspect Yanis will be scapegoated.

Or Syriza could offer the Greeks an in/out referendum in the guise of new elections?

On reflection, if you're on the mainland you don't stand a chance. The feral hordes loping out of Manchester, Glasgow, London, Birmingham - oh God, Birmingham - will soon storm your perimeter.

I love the image of the burned out Quashqai as a symbol of HPC apocalypse. In many parts of the world, a $100 bill folded carefully under your insole will serve you well in times of crisis - better than scotch in my opinion, which will not last too long being lobbed around on South American busses, desert jeep rides etc.

I crave a crash too and have done for close to a decade but I feel this us and them/take no prisoners dogma is only bitter and worthless - and let's face it, we've been on the losing side of the equation since 2008 and still are. There's a hint of a crash now but I've seen it before and had it snatched from my fingers. The PTB have nailed their colours to the mast, so have we and I see it as a showdown, but no need for ignoble outbursts. If and when prices do tank, I'll take no pleasure in seeing the wombles crushed and ruined.

Thatcher's moves against social housing/promoting rabid home ownership were small acts in the play compared to smashing the unions - miners strike anyone? - wars and aggressive posturing (tank turret pic), welfare bashing, IRA struggles, poll tax and selling off state industries/privitisation. It was another last, desperate throw of the grand empire dice. The council housing stuff was just a petty scheme to debase the power of certain municipal councils - viewed through the prism of today's housing obsessions, yes, it looks significant, but we had almost 15 years of socialists in response and no effort to redress the drift: it wasn't Thatcher that doomed us to HPI greed, it was the inelecuctable economic sweep of the late 20th C to suck in easy money to make peope feel they were getting rich - rockstar class seating on Virgin airlines and daytime tv borrow-five-grand ads say it all.

Many of the HPI boasters/steady eddies are vile, without doubt, but my point was that perhaps some of them are dupes or innocents hopers who have done as instructed - just waiting for a different tilt in the scales to many on these boards. They might not have set out to stick the knife into HPCers. A lot of the rage comes from a sense of injustice that is simply not shared by those who have just done as they were told to do. They're wombles, most of them, not sharks.

What is all this nonsense about Thatcher? Do any of you really remember what it was like in the 80s? It was grim, double grim and grim some more. And it was savage, blunt, stupid and unsophisticated. Nobody got anything out of the Thatcher years. The great payout and feel-rich spree began with Blair. The Thatcher years were just tough all over.

Ah, the tangled web, and trying to imagine and speculate on the truths of real lives, real people or investment rogues intertwined with these modest piles of bricks... but they're only houses. Be they insanely overpriced or not. In the Oxford thread I followed a similar house that had cuts to fall to a similar price and was then removed from the market. Perhaps some sad souls have staked their livelihoods, kids' futures and all their petty dreams on these greedy dreams? Not so unlike the rest of us.

Over in the London suburb of North Oxford, the sound of wombles wringing their hands in despair as they proffer the breaking-the-bad-news estate agent a plate of M & S chocolate fancies...a 16% cut from £1.2Mill. http://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/36541658?search_identifier=c2bda730307d93c902f799d8523bebf7#I3x5HXD5VRqdp63F.97 Place sold for 800k eight years back - so they've just lost half of the fantasy gains. Seeing a few cuts like this, but sadly all around the million mark. Bring on the slide...

They don't have the imagination or the ruthless pragmatism for this kind of thinking. And they tried austerity - hic! oops! - and nothing happened with GDP so after two years of gloom they pumped easy money and assets to boost services and make the nation of shopkeepers...sorry, homeowners...rub their hands in glee. Witness the election rhetoric we're getting now. The Tories stick to their lines, they're coached and will press on "safe hands", "economic plan working" and will not deviate. They're planks, and deep down that's what right-drifting inclined voters want, they want planks. Planks are safe. You know where you are with a good plank. They're rich, you're not. Give me a good plank and another cup of horlicks.

But you're forgetting that this is the NEW NORMAL. Up is down, bad is good and worse is better. The market will crash as soon as we get some real economic growth.

Think we tried that in the 1600s, it didn't stick. Regards the place in Providence Tower, if I was dropping a bar on a pad I'd want to be able to see a tree out the window. Not everyone can want to live in a BladeRunner set.

It could be that a sense of powerlessness in the face of insurmountable HPI, banal materialism, the end of culture and growing state control leads to desperate forms of protest - much like detainees going unkempt and smearing their own cell walls with that which drops from their ass? But they're all so dapper, these hipsters. So, perhaps the beards are some psychological twitch, an involuntary sign of rebellion or last ditch stand, like tattoos: you've screwed my future, utterly, well look what I'm going to do to the temple, my corpus, I'll cover it in bad/mindless art and moronic semiotics and grow my beard like a Norwegian trawlerman, that'll show you who cares about a luxury flat in Wapping, I've got a beard a tawny owl could nest in and I'll pay good money to visit a cafe that only serves breakfast cereal just to spite you, so there. I'm so angy, splutter...splutter...I could bite a hole in a can of Lilt, if they still make it?

Today's Angry Young Men have channelled all their rage into growing beards.