woody

I would have thought that if house prices go down further the gold price will continue to increase. Only once house prices plateau and become safe again will people sell gold to buy bricks meaning that gold will decrease. Therefore, the graphs of gold and house are not easily comparable and operate on slightly different time dimensions.

Is the top graph engineered to look like the bottom graph or is it a reflection of other economic cycles? Many years ago, someone on this forum posted graphs showing other bubbles in history and their shape and then compared them to Kondratieff and other cylce theories and there was a good correlation. That then forms a model wave for predicting how other bubbles may work giving the graphs more credibility.

Does anybody know how this might affect the cash isa's? they were were offering quite good interest rates at one point.

Yep. nothing to get into doldrums about.

shore[ly] he could have put some tack into a safe harbour to enable him to sail through the squalls of changing economic tides and tidal waves that are now hitting land? No... the boom for him is bigger than the bank tiller thinks. hope he is wearing some rudder pants

I do live abroad but still value a pint of beer in GBP. To everyone around me, values have dropped by at least 30% because of the forex change - even if you agree that selling prices haven't gone down at all.

There has been a lot of discussion about the exchange rates - super bad for us all getting paid in GBP. However, if all your assets are in UK property, you have lost 50% of the value of your asset base in 1 year. Why? 20% of fall in the house price and 30% because of the value of the GBP against the USD. If the house prices drop further to approximately 35-40% nominal fall from peak, will we have seen a 60-70% drop in the "value"? Looks like it to me. As you can see from my member number, I have been around for a while. A few years ago, suggesting a 30% drop in value drew ridicule (I had thought about 40% would be right as a drop). I am horrified by the speed, acceleration and depth of this problem. The house price crash has so many faces to it.

ah lovely. a classic but unfortunately representative of a huge amount of the public.

It is true that the situation in the Gulf is not all rosy but there are a number of institutions that do not have the level of problems that most, if not all, of the western institutions have. The difficulty in Bahrain is that the central bank is not able to underpin the banking sector - the Qatar and Kuwait authorities are able to much more easily because of their asset bases. There is no tax in Bahrain (there is in Kuwait) but the government (in common with some others) run off the oil revenue - which have fallen to the extent that there are huge deficits. As these revenues drop, the sovereign wealth funds lack funds and it is these entities that then cannot support their investment companies such as Global.

Burning rubbish in the street because there is no one employed to remove it.

That is a bit of an unfair comment. I was here from the start and there was lots of discussion regarding the crash of the stock market etc. Indeed, the discussion was around the triggers for the HPC - ie. in history, an HPC is usually preceded by a stock market crash. That stock market crash might happen about 2 years before the real pain is felt in the housing market. If you look at the market objectively now, I would say that the HPC is only just gathering some speed now and the real pain is yet to come. The stock market decline is entirely within the expectation that had been discussed here a long time ago. What hadn't fully been anticipated were which banks were going to go bust and when but then the sheer stupidity of their profligate lending strategy hadn't been grasped. In any case, repeatedly on this site, there has been problems that the discussions often moved away from the property sector and into the wider economic discussion. This dilution of discussion was not intended by the site which resulted in the splitting of the forum to separate out the off-topic or economic chatter. Therefore, I think it entirely right that HPC has got some recognition for the service it has offered over the year and for the warnings that it provided. Users of HPC predicted the crash would come from about 2006 onwards which is about right for the start of the slowdown.

My parents and grandparents lived in Accrington. Anyone who has been there could believe this story. I remember being there in the late 70s and early 80's and there were shops like this then.

conservative business model and they are able to dump their toxic waste at the door of the US tax payer.

A few years ago on this forum, I remember when there were usually only a few of us and we would just talk about kondratieff and wonder when the world would come to its senses. How times change - how many people are coming here interested to know what is happening to the house prices or is everyone interested in the state of play of the global markets? If you looked back at history, this site and its users were predicting this mayhem a long long time ago, welcome to reality.

TUPE only requires that the contractual entitlement be met. The whole point about bonuses is that they shouldn't be contractual - otherwise, it is treated as salary. Anyhow, if it contributed to profit as stated in the quote, why did they go bust!!!