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Rich Hong Kongers who want to be here would already be here. It has always been very easy to come here if you have a few million (or an income high enough to pay the mortgage on a few million). Poor ones will not be able to afford London even after a crash. I do not mean houses like this, I mean any at all. That leaves any middle class ones who want to relocate and do so successfully (getting a job etc.) enough to live in London who will have an effect on property prices in London. Most people have too many ties to want to move from their home so the number will be very small.

Ripple effect, pushing people out of zone 1. Its not just Russian and Chinese (although they are the biggest groups), its from all over the world. I have come across quite a few South and South East Asians who own London property (not just central, but nice suburbs too). Its not just in the UK, there is dirty money going through every property market, and the Russians and Chinese are buying in a lot of countries. It is what UK law says, and it should either be enforced or abolished. There is a good reason not to have them investing here: they buy influence and spread corruption. There are a lot of influential people and organisations in the UK (universities, politicians, business people) who are too closely linked to Russia and China. Its more of an issue with businesses than with property though - its really not a good idea to let thugs and crooks buy our businesses. Because we care about human beings - the people of those countries who are being cheated and oppressed?

There are other alternatives that could work. The French, German and other western European systems are mostly pretty good as far as I know. The NHS was always had a large element of private providers paid for be the government - GPs, for example. There is no one language that is important to us, as English is in many other countries.

If its a Ltd company HMRC look at director loans and there are tax rules about them : https://www.gov.uk/directors-loans/you-owe-your-company-money If you are a sole trader or in a partnership you can have some flexibility because of the blurry lines between personal and business finances, but blatantly spending the loan on home improvements is probably a breach of the (very unclear) rules. If your business is a Ltd company, its more restricted. You can only only pay dividends out of (retained) profits. You may have profits that have been tied up in the business because you did not have the cash to pay them out (if you bought assets, kept some for working capital, etc.) so you might free some of it for dividends. You can continue paying yourself a salary, but not give yourself a big increase or bonus. If you give yourself a loan then you have the problem with tax above.

That is precisely the sort of thing banks do not want them to do. If someone has more debt, then that has to be taken into account when deciding how good a risk they are. That is just business as usual . On top of that, to get a bounce back loan you have to certify a negative effect from covid or lockdown. Its often not huge, but a lender will want to know what it was

https://www.fca.org.uk/consumers/how-complain

I got an offer to raise my credit limit on one card last week. Also got a new credit card (because I like 0% offers) last month. I am self employed with a moderate income and live in an affluent area of an affluent county and I was amazed that I have significantly higher than average credit scores for the area(with Experian and Equifax). What are people doing? Buying everything on credit?

I have read and enjoyed it. The examples he gives are very good, and I think he is right about many things. His interpretation of the causes is sometimes a bit ideological, but that does not stop the book being worth reading.

What does that even mean? One director? One shareholder? One person is director and shareholder? This looks to me like a misleading summary by a clueless journalist. It might be a distorted rewording of this: https://www.mortgagesolutions.co.uk/news/2020/06/18/barclays-to-stop-limited-company-and-multi-unit-btl-lending/

Its not really an all time high. The ONS says "not been higher". The "all time high" is spin added by the OP. If you look at the previous release: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/bulletins/privaterentalmarketsummarystatisticsinengland/october2018toseptember2019 what the data says is "rents were unchanged in the period up to march this year.".

Theresa May is no longer either PM or Home Secretary. Boris Johnson is very different, as are current senior member of cabinet. Theresa May is a remainer who agreed to support Brexit in order to become PM. Cameron was a remainer too. the referendum was promised and implemented by remainers who thought they would win and then be able say "we had a referendum and now the topic is closed".

The only Trump voter I know supports him because she used to work for him and found him to be a good boss and a kind man at a personal level. I do think a lot of people probably voted Trump because of how poor the alternatives were and they were fed up enough to vote for anything anti-establishment. I do not think the same is true for Brexit: there has been discontent with the EU for a long time and I think people do not want the level of political integration the EU was heading for. There are good reasons why the UK voted remain by a large margin in the 1970s and leave in 2016. I am slightly older than you, also have letters after my name, not white, not British by birth (and of immigrant ancestry in my birth country), grew up in London and voted Leave.

So rural areas near cities will get more expensive? Sounds plausible, and so may outer suburbs (still convenient, and you get more room and a garden). That means lower demand in city centres, and very likely more supply as offices with no prospect of being let get converted to residential.

The first users a highly subjective measure, and as Sundar Katawala commented in the article people hold themselves to the higher bar. The second is just a few cherry picked stories, not systematic attempt to add up numbers. It just shows what junk can be published in some fields.

The UK is one of the least racist countries in the world. Confirmed by numerous studies, and, as an immigrant and visibly ethnic minority, its my experience too.

I was trying to explain why banks using ML will often not be able to disclose their weightings in a useful form, even if they were forced to.

Its even simpler than that: those who felt they gained from remaining voted remain, those who thought they would gain from leaving voted leave. Take immigration (as people here seem obsessed with it). Someone who hires low paid labour would feel very different about unskilled immigration than someone who is low paid labour. If you look at the graph at the bottom the biggest issue for leavers was sovereignty/bureaucracy. The next biggest was immigration, but a most of that was the economic effect of immigration - which is what I was taking about above. I think the biggest issue was identity: whether people want to be British or European (Elton John style).

The government is not rabidly xenophobic and starting from that expectation is plan silly. We did not leave the EU because only because of immigration, and even where immigration was a concern it was unlimited unskilled immigration - both leave campaigns said that they were happy to have more skilled non-EU immigration. There are currently only 300k people who have BNO passports. a total of 2.9m people qualify, but 2.6m of them have to applied for a BNO passport. They are being offered an extension of the the time they can stay in the UK to one year instead of six months, and a potential further extension of they have enough money, and if they keep extending it until they have lived here five years then they can apply for citizen ship. Only a small proportion of people will want to apply. Most people are very reluctant to leave their home. Moving countries is difficult, expensive and risky. Not if you are going somewhere to work for a few years, but a permanent move is tough. While immigration numbers can look big in absolute terms, as a proportion of the populations people leave it is tiny, and the affluent are far more likely to emigrate than others.

Sort of true, but people did warn about the risk of a pandemic. Read "Stop Reading the News" by Rolf Dobelli. He comments that obsession with current news (at the time he wrote it) was distracting people from thinking about long term issues such as the risk of a pandemic. I think focusing on the risk of a pandemic is leading us to ignore other risks, and even increasing them by our reaction to the pandemic. We are always ready to fight the last war.

True, but I do not think that is as important. At least you can make sure that it is correct. Given increased use of machine learning the weightings may not exist in a comprehensible form anyway. If they are using neural networks for example, you can express a trained neural network as a polynomial equation but it would be a massive one (a variable for each input, order equal to the number of layers, and each layer adding a new set of relationships).

have been saying it for a long time and I am so pleased its not just me!

You do have a legal right to see that data.

According to their website: "we’re promising not to take any action to repossess your home if you've fallen into arrears because of the financial impact of coronavirus until 31 May 2021. You’ll just need to stay in touch and keep working with us to help get your mortgage back on track." They have left themselves a lot of wriggle room: 1. It only applies if you have fallen into arrears because of coronavirus: this could be interpreted as support while you are on furlough, but not if you are made redundant. 2. Its only until Mary 2021. They can do what they want after that. Probably if you look like you can pay it off with an extra year or two on the term you are probably OK, other wise they will repossess. 3. You have to "stay in touch and keep working with us to help get your mortgage back on track" - that could mean that if you do not look like you are going to get your mortgage back on track they will repossess. Joe also said that people who take a further mortgage payment break should have it noted on their credit rating until their payments returned to "normal": https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-52847131

Critically important to understand this. There is one important caveat: as long as you borrow in your own currency. Countries default when they borrow in a currency that is not their own. Some countries do not even have their own currency: small countries like Lichenstein, or after facing severe economic problems like hyper-inflation. The Eurozone has this problem: its countries that do the borrowing, but no country controls the currency. The problem should eventually be solved (and this was the original intention) by further political integration. Inflation tends to transfer wealth from those with lots of money and unearned income to those with debt and earned income. But while that is the overall effect, there are lots of exceptions: retired people on modest but fixed pensions, high earners with lots of debt, etc. In the long run inflation and interest rates tend to move together so sustained high inflation will lead to low house prices relative to salaries, and maybe in absolute terms. Current levels of inflation and interest rates are far too low. About 5% to 10% for both would be much better (room to cut, sensible house prices, meaningful returns on ordinary savings accounts, some deterrent to high levels of consumer debt.)

Good point. There are going to be other relatively simple ways of filtering out people worth investigating, and checks like this can be automated.