MongerOfDoom

Where do I send my 10k, and do the Candys know they overpaid by 990k?

<br /><br /><br />The article says i) two adults with three kids moved in with a relative who has a council flat, ii) they now complain it's crowded and the council should provide better accommodation, iii) the council is willing to give them the same sort of help they would give to others who have nowhere to live, iv) that offer of help has not been accepted because it would involve a 90 minute commute and the new propery would not be at a massively subsidised rent or theirs to live in even after the kids leave home, and iv) the Guardian there is something unfair about that though don't quite pinpoint it. The article says very little about banksters, other than that they would pay 3k a month for a flat similar to that which the family feel is not quite adequate for their needs. It appears the husband earns 24k and the wife stays at home.

<br /><br /><br />One way it could be different would be if the "loan" was non-recourse. So you could walk away if you didn't want to "rent" any more. With the particular loan mentioned earlier that would likely mean losing the "acquisition payment" - and that is if you actually can walk away (the website does not make that immedeately clear). AFAIK, they seem to be offering a conventional mortgage described using slightly different words than usual. They even do discounted variable "rent". I love the way you can "rent" a house so that you can then let it to someone else .....

I have 10 acres of land near London for sale. I want UKP100 plus a 50% uplift clause for 10 years. Your advice still is not to touch it? I really don't see what the problem is, as long as the method of valuation and conditions for when the uplift clause is triggered are crystal-clear and do not motivate underhand behaviour. For example, the previous owner could put a value on any increase in value he claims occured following the granting of planning permission. The present owner then chooses to either pay whatever percentage of that value was originally agreed, or alternatively chooses to offer the previous owner the chance to return the original purchase price + RPI to him, and also pay the part of the claimed uplift that the new owner would have otherwise kept.

The only relevant fact in the article is that 13 millon people live on less than 60% of the median income. By that definition we would still have the poor if everyones income doubled, tripled, quadrupled, etc. Lots of those "poor" will likely be asset rich beyond the dreams of the supposedly wealthy part of the population.

The people can choose a different gift that is not conditional on them paying any of "their" money to anyone, and is still rather generous. It's called the LHA. The reason they don't is that they are still a lot better off than others who don't pay the "tax". If you don't have council accommodation then additional space is often very expensive, and beyond the means of a large proportion of the working population. It's really quite simple. Some poor people get all their accommodation paid for. Others get a contribution that covers a large proportion of the cost, and pay themselves for heavily subsidised additional space (though even then the money often comes from other benefits they get). Few of them are even slightly tempted to leave and let someone else currently on the waiting list suffer the horrible, horrible, abuse instead .....

I am not sure the financial impact of it bothers anyone on here. It does however indicate that at least one coalition party is a complete waste of space, seeing as this is supposed to be one of their major ideas.

So she pays between £7 and £9 a week for at least one spare bedroom, and possibly for two? And that is somehow an injustice?

They publish the deficit. That number tells you an enormous lot, as it does when published elsewhere. Including in Greece.

I think that giving houses away would still be easy in most parts of the country :-) The people affected by the 25k cap will (I believe) be larger non-working families, aka the ideal people to live somewhere with cheap housing and no work and where everyone votes Labour already. I think a sensible principle to enforce is that working-age people who work should be better off than those who don't. If single working people up North customarily live in three-bed flats that no-one else competes for, I'll agree you might have a point. The state will pay for them to rent privately if they so choose. Again, if there are no waiting lists for social housing and everybody can get some, I'll agree you are right.

Or several claimants could share a larger house. In any case, the 25k cap will eventually convince some southerners to go north. Very misleading. An occupier of a large property ends up paying less than £20 a week per bedroom. That is vastly below the market price in most places, and so their housing costs them less per bedroom than someone's who is not "taxed". The "tax" makes things more fair rather than less. Though we could instead fix the injustice by giving people who don't have a spare bedroom (say) £200 quid a month so they could rent some storage or do something else to compensate .... It seems perfectly workable to me. In the end, it's only people who don't work and don't expect to work who need to worry much at all. Even they are free to do exactly what someone in work would do, except the state will pay all of their rent after they move. I really don't see anything ill-thought out or unworkable about it.

Completely incorrect. The money multiplier is real, but it's not as simple as just signing on the dotted line. And yes, the bank *must* have any money they want to lend you on deposit, own it, or borrow it from someone who does. That is why they bother collecting debts, which is surely harder than just writing new loans for free. Or indeed why they turn some borrowers away. The newly "created" money appears because the person whose money was lent still has it in their account, and the borrower also now has it in theirs. But the borrower promised to repay all of it and then some, so he also owes roughly the same amount as he borrowed. Hence the total bank balances have increased, but so has the borrowers loan balance. The overall wealth hasn't changed much, if at all. So no new money was created, and especially no free money for the bankers. The system is sufficiently broken as it is without having to make up reasons .....

So you were serious. It does not matter who the money went to. If he still gets the same number of hours digging the same ditches, they did create $5 a day worth of value. Errm, no. The extra money appeared because he is willing to give up a chunk of his income over years to come, and it can be spent right now. It's just like a mortgage. You give up a couple of decades worth of earnings and get to buy a house there and then. No magic needed. I don't see the example demonstrates anything of the kind, and especially not that it could be taken seriously even if it appeared to. Do you really think companies can just magic money from thin air? Or buy assets way above their true value (as you imply)? And all because they are in finance where that is for some reason normal? Do you think that Bear Sterns, Lehman, Merrill, etc etc are now history simply because they could not run whatever they were doing quickly enough? If you think you know how to make a lot of money, why not try? An easy $20k made each morning will be more that enough to pay for all the lawyers and accountants you need. Assuming only that whatever you do is legal to the same extent as what the industry does.

Yet another creative writing class gone badly wrong? How much would you pay to forever receive an index-linked $5 a day? If they can genuinely allow the poor sod to make that much extra money, value has been "created". It might have just moved from people who previously had cheap ditches to the digger, but I bet he is not complaining. Would you really tell someone who could teach you how to charge your customers more that you won't pay them a penny for doing so? BTW, I have seen a fair bit of waste that the financial intermediaries benefited from a lot more than their clients. But why bother with a horribly confused argument that barely makes any sense? Mortgage lending has been a wonderful negative sum game, and so have interest rates swaps sold by UK banks to naive customers. Why not start with that if you really need to prove a point as basic as that there exist examples of the financial sector being worse than useless?

And what do you think they do with their money? Use it as wallpaper? They'll just sell their Sterling to someone else who wants to spend it in the UK, seeing as it can't be spent anywhere else.