TwoWolves

All this makes perfect sense. Rents are going up because people are not buying, they are sitting on the sidelines as prices soften or fall. I've seen this pattern before every crash. In fact I'm doing the same right now. Little is on the market because sellers can see sentiment has changed and are holding off, there will be no crash until distressed sellers are forced to sell at discounts. This will not happen until the pension schemes are allowed to default forcing pensioners to down-size. In my area most family-sized homes sell to retired Boomers!

The school my eldest attends is part church and part state funded. Parents raise a lot of it too. It's in surplus but still maintains an excellent standard. All just good management and engagement.

It really was Thatcher's worst policy and I could see that at the time - even though I was a middle-class young teenager at the time. It really has gone as I could see. There is however one factor few note. The Labour government preceding this bankrupted the country so badly that the Conservatives were looking for anything that could raise revenue - this was a fire-sale to keep the lights on. Especially as maintenance of the council houses was draining, people treated the government as a money-pipe and didn't care about the properties they were given. This whole thing has a lot more historical complications than are immediately clear.

Because it will never be reformed, the leaders are mad. I would support a sane European Union but this is not such an animal, thus it will die. I suspect a debt crisis starting this year and the Brits taking the blame - a small price for freedom.

That is one amazing contradiction you are maintaining in your head. I couldn't live with it.

The Fed can save the dollar or the stock market, not both. A new inflexion point is nearly here, we are living in history.

Let's just hope that they don't get the chance to test that theory because we all know it will just destroy the currency. Amazing how many adults cling on to fantasies all their lives.

The tech bubble is bursting, it was all riding on QE and most of the CBs have paused their programmes.

Quite a US open! I was reading yesterday that it was all fixed... ha! (-2.44% DJIA now)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Soviet_Union#/media/File:Demography_USSR.svg ~200M to our ~40M That enough for you, pillock?

Spot-on. The generation that fought in The War were the last great generation, my Father was born in 1912 and he and his friends were self-less lovely people. He said that Soviets infiltrated the UK while they were away fighting and warped the minds of those left behind. Mind you, a lot of the best of the country never came back alive did they?

Complete toss. Finance was as dull as ditch-water and not that well paid until the Financial revolution in the '80s and believe me, manufacturing was a corpse by 1975. Everything in the shops went from "Made in England" to "Made in the USA" (or Japan) overnight. You just seem to be too young to know much about this era. History didn't start with your first *****.

Precisely this. Globalization started (agin) after WW2 - it was the price paid to the banking cartels for the war debt. It was also the root cause of WW1. I really didn't understand the relevance of most of that, bar the last sentence. I think you need a coffee.

Somehow this never gets the scrutiny it deserves. Britain requesting an IMF loan is completely forgotten. I recall the newspaper headlines recording the business failures every week, it was a bloodbath. At least 50% of Thatchers tenure was turning around that catastrophe but her true failure was never shrinking the state, she never really faced-down the socialists embedded in local government and education.

I feel tearful when I visit the place I grew up. Everything is under concrete and brick and the air polluted, what a sacrifice to pay so we can house the world's poor.