captain sensible

Last one was 1990-91 then a long spell of not much happening till 96. 6 years before they started to pick up again. Will it be 6 years then? What's different this time? - no eastern european immigrants will flood in and need houses - interest rates can never be as low again because the chinese have stopped building cheap lawnmowers - the govt's in huge debt - the population's in more debt than ever before - we've got no north sea oil left to bail us out The UK is f----d. There won't be another housing boom, or economic boom, like this one. All I can offer you is 15 years of pain. I'll be in my masturbatarium if you need me Love CS

Read to the bottom and you see GMAC gave him the house back. Which was nice.

We've got it pretty good here. Generally you don't get robbed and shot. Most people have clean dry warm houses with hot running water. And if you get ill, OK you might have to wait a bit but you get sorted out pretty much for free, and you'll probably live through it. We've got beautiful countryside. And we might moan about the rain but it's a fecking blessing believe me. There's always going to be better places but when you're up in the top few richest countries like we are, it's pretty marginal. If you want people who say hi to you in the street, there are places in the UK like that. If you want to get away from chavs, don't live in Shaws Way, Twerton, Bath BA2.

You're lucky. Great way to learn - make the most of it (pause...senior moment) is there such a thing as March '06 gold? What's it trading at?

The bear parade is most definitely on, and I can't wait for the bear market

that a silver spoon then? or maybe copper... You know anything about that big chinese copper short?

ok the opinion of the central bank's policy may be nonsense or rumour, we just don't know. But then you say that the market is tight and a small investment by a bank would trigger a large change in the price... don't know about physical demand. Don't know about charts. The way I'm approaching this is: I'm an investor with a few k to put somewhere, I won't touch property, I won't touch UK equities because after the current m&a activity dies down, the economy is looking pretty grim. US equities look just as fragile, Europe is dead, Japan is a possibility but might have shot its load. What's left? Gold. I think you might be right about the short term correction though. Would be interested to know how you are doing the short. Spread bet?

I see some pretty good reasons for a long position, and I'd agree with you on one year, maybe 8 months, depending on how fast things move (don't forget the net - anyone can buy gold online tonight if they want, which wasn't the case earlier) Which justifications do you think are preposterous? What sort of time frame you looking at for the correction? (ps yeah this is in the wrong forum, but hey, once it's posted we can't shift it, and anyway if it had been in investments I wouldn't have seen it.)

There's something very nice about a "gold rush" that actually involves gold. Pissed about for ages trying to find a way to get exposure to gold. But mining companies don't appeal, and it's hard to find a fund that tracks the index (there is one, but you need to be able to trade on NYMEX). So in the end I bought some real coins. You pay a premium of about 5% over the spot gold price, but what the hell - and I was curious anyway to see a real gold coin. Very disappointed when they arrived (by Royal Mail Special Delivery! expecting a man in a helmet at least). Gold coloured and satisfyingly heavy, but just basically a lump of clunky metal. What do folk see in it? How come it's worth so much?

It was going to have a huge effect on prices and I was thinking of buying on that basis. The billions paid into SIPPs so far show that. Now it's off, it will have a big effect in the other direction.

You're in a bear pit, what do you expect?

HO HO HO! Merry Christmas!

Renting? Love it. Anything goes wrong? Someone else fixes it. Retiling the bathroom is the next job being scheduled in for the landlord. And anyone who says 'surely you'll want to buy at some point' shuts up pretty quick when they see how nice the place is and hear how much I'm paying.

There's a derelict house I want to do up. It's been empty the past 2 years and I've held off investing while I wait for the stagnation/slump/crash to play out. Build up cash and maybe do it in 5 years time. But then SIPPs came along, and suddenly we're looking at 10% pa house price rises again (my projection). So if I don't do it now then I might not get a chance. Can't sit around and watch it go up by £20k a year. I did the sums. Drafted the plans. Talked to the owner. Checked with the council. And I was wrestling with whether I could afford the time or whether it would interfere with running my business. I knew property was really a duff investment over a 10 year term, but over the next 3 years we might have seen some big gains. To try and get a feel for how much SIPPS would affect the market, I called financial advisers to see what interest they'd had in SIPPs. I read up on the HMRC website, read every news article I could find, the lot. See also quote from Bootle below. Suddenly property had become a Sensible investment for the short term. I wanted to do this refurb so much, and I couldn't afford to wait for the SIPP sharks to pile in, but I couldn't afford for my business to suffer. It was driving me up the wall. Then tonight I just happened to be looking at the budget report and what it meant for oil stocks, and saw the headline: Self-Invested Pensions: Anger as new tax break for savers who invest in property is removed ... the rest is a particularly long thread on HPC. So thank you Mr Brown! I can sleep tonight. I can get back to sense and get back to some real work. And thank God, thank God I didn't buy.

Yes. No pics on big AVI version. Windows Media Player downloads a codec, says it doesnt work, then plays the sound anyway.

yep well it was always going to pick up a bit in the spring.

It's a tragedy and you're right that people dying and injured is far more important than the effects on house prices. But this isn't a disasters discussion board, it's a house price discussion board, so it's quite right and proper that it's discussed here. People all over the world are talking about the effects it will have on their lives; seismologists are looking at their field, airlines at theirs, economists at theirs. We shouldn't be scared to talk about how it will affect the housing market.

lol particularly Name your chav baby

No. Good idea for a lot of transactions, but won't work. Not now. If your house is overpriced in a buyers market people will not even look at it and you won't get a chance to accept their low offer.

Aberdonian, Glaswegian, Geordie, Welsh, Cornish, Cockney, middle class English blah, RP...whatever. Probably not Scouse though You want to live in a country, learn to speak the pissing language. And do it well so people can understand you and don't have to keep saying WHAT? every few words. I'm standing on moral high ground the size of a BTLer's debts here because I've done it myself. And you wouldn't believe the difference it makes to the sort of welcome you get.

ta.

You're partly right but also wrong. I know a woman like you describe, who wouldn't be seen dead in a scruffy house, living happily in an extremely nice rented place for not a lot of cash.

Interesting point... here's the stats

A translation for everyday folk Moores Law is fcuked. At the moment it's a self fulfilling prophecy - companies have to do it or their competitors will get the business. It's quoted as doubling every 18 months but it does vary. There comes a limit on how small you can get things, at 90 nm you are talking about 300 atoms wide. However you can do some clever shit with power management which might help. Foundries to build chips at these tiny sizes are ******* expensive at $2 billion. That's $1m a day depreciation - more than BBB and TTRTR put together. Why not design the damn things better instead of just expecting to be able to cram in more transistors on a chip? If we reach a limit on size people might put a bit more effort into this. If you make stuff the same it's cheaper. Build a load of identical chips and just run different software on them. That works great. DVDs are like razor blades. Invest in robot dogs. "Sensible Industries - a flashing blade through the jargon jungle"

It's a thorny issue race. Difficult to discuss, but easier on a forum For me it comes down to language, and whether folk are prepared to fit in. If people come here and want to live in this country, they should learn to speak the language well, with a decent accent, should send their kids to UK schools, not separate them out, and should make an effort to make British friends, not just stick to their race. I would expect to do the same if I went to live in Latvia, India, wherever. If someone does that, they are British and they are welcome. I couldn't give a toss about their colour or which boat they came in on.