disenfranchised

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3015766/Dozens-MPs-rent-London-homes-claiming-1-3million-expenses-taxpayers-hotel-rooms.html

A most amusing post on a bike forum I'm a member of branded the BMW R1200GS (the bike popularised by Ewan & Charlie's adventures) "the motorcycling equivalent of a f**king caravan" They do seem to be something of a middle class trinket. Every time I hit the Cotswolds for a day on one of my (much older / cheaper) bikes I end up following a couple of them which have had enough kit bolted on to make it to Africa, but are actually used by a 50 year old management accountant wearing a grands worth of gortex kit to wobble through the wilds of Oxfordshire dragging the back brake.

Yep. Wonder what they spunked all the equity they took out on? A BTL?

Yes, I understand that - its going on round here. A lot of the NIMBY brigade are retired professionals with a lot of time to dedicate to being NIMBY ****s as well. It would require a motivated central government with tough planning rules to make it happen. The sort of thing May promised but won't deliver.

Yes, I understand that - its going on round here. A lot of the NIMBY brigade are retired professionals with a lot of time to dedicate to being NIMBY ****s as well. It would require a motivated central government with tough planning rules to make it happen. The sort of thing May promised but won't deliver.

Yes, I understand that - its going on round here. A lot of the NIMBY brigade are retired professionals with a lot of time to dedicate to being NIMBY ****s as well. It would require a motivated central government with tough planning rules to make it happen. The sort of thing May promised but won't deliver.

I cannot imagine why anybody would choose to buy a holiday home in Cornwall anyway. You can buy a place much cheaper in France or Spain that, thanks to the fairly dire UK transport network, you can also get to faster and cheaper from most of the country. A guy I used to work with bought a flat in a complex in Spain with a pool for £65k 2 years ago. He can leave work at 5pm in the UK and have his feet up by the pool for 11pm. £15 return train to the airport & flights start from £60 return depending when booked. It takes 6 hours solid to drive to the Cornwall coast from here with a good run and no stops - a lot longer if you leave at 5pm on Friday. A train would cost £125 return and take more than 2 hours longer door to door than his trip to Spain!!! Cornwall can be very grim in the winter whilst southern Spain can top 20 degrees and bright sunshine in November. Cornwall is nice in the summer, but £250k+ for a cottage and a whole working days worth of travel, and most of the locals hate & resent you anyway? Not even if I won the lottery.

Regarding involving local people in the planning process - it doesn't have to be with an absolute veto right. It is possible to mandate a certain level of homebuilding, but allow local people a say in where, as long as they cannot just say "no"

Urgency / motivation to sell is what is really required.

Some sources in the US are referring to this as a "second gilded age" marked by the same social/political/economic dimensions that marked the last one from approx 1875-1900. Corruption, overweening influence pedalling & corporate power, growing wealth inequality, populism & polarised politics, unabashed displays of arrogance and wealth from the elites contrasting spiralling homeless problems etc... etc... Some big political pressure building.

****** London. ****** the stupid people who let all the handout snatching low skill 3rd world non-workers in. ****** the estate agents & developers flogging off plan in China. ****** the smug privately educated metropolitan socialists with a trust fund. ****** the whole degenerate mess. Yours Sincerely, Disenfranchised Working in/out of London for the last 4 years

3x1+1 was the lending practice of the time, rather than enforced by legislation though? The banks are the cause of this mess by abandoning that standard, light touch Labour & their BoE cronies allowed it to occur. New Labour is dead and the Blairites have no power, but the banks..?

Yes we do, and we have it to an extent - but the balance has been tilted because New Labour were not socialists. Their policies mainly paid off the working class and poor with handouts to secure their vote, whilst making it worse for them in the long run as austerity has gradually squeezed - it was all rather like the Democrats do with the black community in the USA. The balance now favours capital to the point where it's flight outside the tax system is tolerated, even joked about by the then Chancellor on TV (Osborne made a jest about dodging inheritance tax). There isn't enough money or inclination to be sufficiently socialist to serve most of the people better (even though that inclination is building) without dealing with tax evasion and avoidance and the massive intergenerational inequality that has built up. Endeavour has to gain more power over capital, or we really are screwed and all bets are off.

I think the 80s saw the death of the first iteration of socialism, which was based upon a closed shop worker power mentality that could never survive the onslaught of globalisation. Now, I believe I am living through the waning of post-imperial globalist capitalism, but it won't die quickly. As the cost of houses and higher education have spiralled, human behaviour has adapted to fit. The very people who you want to be having more kids (those with an intellect and a work ethic) seem to have fewer or leave it later in life. Their kids will inherit earlier and divide wealth between fewer of themselves, which simply perpetuates the existing inequalities. We have a culture of home ownership and landlordism, and the 3rd highest wealth inequality out of 55 leading countries, that cannot be reversed overnight. Even if Labour win in 2022, they seem wedded to old ways of thinking and focused more on income than wealth inequality. They prefer to focus on social housing than the entirely legitimate aspiration of many younger working people to own. A generation of ordinary people locked out of home ownership and into shit insecure rentals is politically abandoned in the wilderness. A chunk of them have bought into the debtslave mentality and taken on ruinous mortgages, so are now VI's on the side of "anything but a crash". The Tories are the party of them, and generation X and boomer aspiration, and appear willing to self destruct before they change. I think we'll have a crash of sorts, as we always seem to eventually, but it won't deliver that 4x multiple, which would require 50% off. I can't see that happening. I think we'll see between 15% & 30% off the average. If we ever do get back to the 4x multiple, it will require a clear out and a change of thinking in politics on both sides of the house, and only happen through drastic policy change, but that's a big if.

A friend scored 10% off a new build in Herts last year. Deciding if/when to buy in this enduring bubble market is all about a relative balancing act of time, savings, rent, and lifestyle pressures. The closer to the middle of London you go, the higher the stakes are as the more ridiculous the prices and rents.

It still surprises me this forum talks so little about the significance of banking reform. From January 1st 2019, the balance sheets of all major banks are segregated to keep their UK Retail banking, including mortgages, seperate from their investment activities. They are already being stress tested separately. The next round of higher S24 tax bills lands in January. I'm not throwing my hat into the "unleash the Marxists" ring until I've watched the market through to the end of 2019.

I know a guy who lives in rural France and worked in the Midlands for years, staying in a rented room mon-fri

The market has topped out here, so no capital appreviation this year. Yield on this place is so appalling it is currently lower than inflation, so yes, the landlord is technically losing money, bro.

Everybody is in a different situation. A house you truly want to live in that can be purchased cheaper than renting at a sustainable repayment you could meet if rates were well up, and when you want to put down roots and make somewhere your own, I don't see any problem buying. The problem is most people aren't in that boat, so they are chosing between buying a house they cannot afford, buying a pokey dump they don't want, or renting. My rent is the same as the mortgage payment on a house worth half the size of the one I rent. I have garages, a workshop, parking, a huge garden, no neighbours. It's great. If prices come down then I'll happily buy somehwere similar. But for now, paying 60+% of my share of the rent from investment income and the bills from what I have earned is ideal for me. The landlord had to stump up over 5 grand for a new oil burning boiler last year. There's a lot to be said for renting for me.

IBM make good acquisitions of smaller software developers and make money out of other people's innovation.

Indeed - usually multiple legacy systems that don't interface well too. Fascinating and a bit scary to work on when the numbers stop adding up.

Looking that way to me. The fact we have always lived in a 2-tier society where rules and enforcement are targeted at the 99% to the benefit of the elite is starting to become more openly apparent. When a group of politicians with any clout will break ranks and start running on an anti-corruption, anti-influence peddling, anti-tax evasion ticket is anybody's guess though.

One of the growing threats to the banks is Fintec companies making payments cheaper and more convenient than they are able to, whilst using a payments infrastructure they have to build and maintain. When you couple that with new financing models for businesses using investment variations on crowdfunding and peer to peer lending, the banks are looking increasingly unwieldy and outdated. No wonder they are so balls deep into mortgaging property on the retail side and creating speculative financial instruments on the investment side. I have done a fair bit of work on the deep mechanics of how banks reconcile all that digital money. The size of the organisations involved and the age and complexity of some of the accounting systems mean they are often far from the sharp end when it comes to the back end of it all. They can give us as consumers, a nice modern looking app or website, but there's often the IT equivalent of a steam engine in the background.

https://www.ft.com/content/137b28d8-43b6-11e8-93cf-67ac3a6482fd This deserves a public enquiry but will be brushed under the rug.

Switch cards killed low value retail cheques before chip & pin - I think "peak cheque" was about 1990. Faster Payments and online banking took out a load of the high value stuff. Electronic image based cheque clearing is starting now, and will have taken over from physically carting them about from bank to bank soon. http://www.unitetheunion.org/news/site-closures-and-600-job-cuts-by-ipsl-branded-tragic-by-unite/ That's another 600 jobs on the white collar automation scrap pile for the banks at the biggest processing company, with more surely to follow across the industry eventually when you consider the reduced branch visits and so on.