ChinaReader

Which in fairness isn't unlike any pension - pay in a hundred pounds a month (or more) for many years and see nothing back except a statement for decades, then eventually get to the stage where you get money posted to your account each month. More maintenance for a land lord, but since pensions don't give a positive yield for decades, I can understand how BTLers do the sums and say "have that" and take equity as a bonus on top. Or just MEW it until you die, and let the banks sort out the paperwork / balance at the end. Cruise anyone?

Pretty neutral in Shanghai today (+1%) - sorry guys, no more free quakes from here this week!

I just had visions of a purple alien wielding petrol bombs and storming the council meeting screaming "Save the play centre". Hence the scared smiley. I wouldn't dream of interfering with your right to protest... I just wouldn't try it where I live.

You assume some corporate memory of the detail of the events. Surely the people who wind these schemes into frenzy are 20-40. Cue collapse, they all leave and work in B&Q, and in twenty years you repeat the cycle with a bunch of 20-40 year olds that were two young to realise what happened last time. Or do I give them too little credit? (Pun noted, but not intended.)

Nutters all. Welcome to the asylum. But at least it's our asylum. Justice: I do wonder where they'd put all the people they tried to arrest if a hundred thousand actually got angry enough to march on Downing Street if they enforced the "no more than two rule" (a particularly ironic rule since suicide bombers rarely more about in groups of more than one!!! ). Aren't our jails supposed to be full? Do we really have that many holding cells in police stations in the capital? Scooter: "I think a few more job cuts would be in order. Had I know about the "protest", I would have shown these parasites a fecking riot."

And the strongest advocate of globalisation in the last few decades? America.

Pessimists are selling, optimists are buying.

WASHINGTON - Sales of new U.S. homes fell 16.6 percent in January and prices were little changed as the number of new homes on the market decreased slightly, according to a government report on Wednesday showing some weakness in the unsteady housing sector. The monthly decline was the sharpest in 13 years, since a 23.8 percent drop-off in January 1994. Article

You missed out on a quid there mate - could have "bought yourself something nice"!

hike: the newspaper translation for "increase". e.g. 0.25% increase in base rate = hike, 4.2% increase in council tax = hike. I'm not disagreeing that real inflation is way above CPI, but bad reporting still annoys me! I mean, surely a 4-5% increase is actually no surprise any more, as it happens every year. Hike implies surprising and unusual increase - or is that just my imagination?! Rant over.

IIRC, about a year ago Beijing issued a letter of interest (or something like that) saying "we'll have 130 planes" and Airbus said "well, with an order that big it makes sense to build them in China, so we'll set up a factory near Beijing". I'm sure is Cardiff placed an order for 130 planes, jobs would be secure in Wales...!

So he was priced out December 2000?! If he's been in Estate Agents' offices for the last six years he'll be exponentially more annoyed than he was when that article went to press!

But since they aren't going out and buying today, that's not a like-for-like comparison.Granted, you could get more for your money 3-4 years ago than you can today, obviously. But margam's point was that if you didn't take the site advice 3-4 years ago you'd be richer now than if you stayed here. And that's only true if you cash-out. If you want to compare buying now vs. buying 3-4 years ago, and selling say ten years from now in 2017, we can do that too... but we'll have to wait until 2017 to get a valid comparison. No-one is richer for buying 3-4 years ago unless they've sold their house and taken the gain in equity as cash. And you still have to weigh that against the interest they'll have been paying on their six-figure debt. If they STR right now and take the profit, well done them. Otherwise it's nothing more than paper-profit.

assuming, apparently, that they bought, held onto it for those 3-4 years, then came on the forum, changed their mind, and Sold-To-Rent and took the profit. Otherwise they're no richer.

You can rely on them... to strike and protest every time. Are the lorries at the docks yet, or are they still on their breakfast?

But that's just it - the articles yesterday were about investors "locking in the profits" they're made over the past few months. It's just like house prices in this way, in that people report paper-profits of 10% pa for years, but when things start to dip a few go "hold on, if I don't sell, I won't have made any of that profit... look, my money is disappearing"... If you invested on Monday, your hard-earned money is disappearing. If you invested six months ago, your theoretical profit is merely correcting to less than what you thought it was on Monday. I'm not saying it isn't a crash - I'm just being a bit Bearish and saying wait-and-see. By all means sell if you're in the midst of it, but I always thought the accepted wisdom is that the Stock Market isn't a game for those with a nervous disposition... Edit to add: Was -2.8% ten minutes ago. Now only -1.6%. Intriguing to watch I'll admit. :-)

Mmm, ok... they'll wake up in a few hours so it could be interesting. I read on one of these threads there's an actual agreed % for a crash - was it 10% is called a correction, and 20% is called a crash?

Thanks for the links. Surely it'll take a week to see what's actually unfolding though? Days of Tuesday Panic, Wednesday Steady, Thursday Drop a bit... anything could happen next, so "reading it" is nigh on impossible! In a week you can tell me "I told you so", how about that?

A quiz for you... List as many major Chinese cities as you can. List as many major US cities as you can. What numbers did you get? And why? Repeat this exercise in ten years. See if things have changed... (Maxwell, what was the book you read? There are plenty of them around, although I think sentiment is starting to shift in the more recent ones...)

Oi! :angry:

It would guarantee them another two terms after a five-year sabattical.

If you pay fees of, say 8k pa for seven years, the money's gone. If you pay an extra fifty-six grand on your house, in seven years you can sell up and get 56k+HPI(-interest on the loan if you do the full sums) back, so it's an investment twice over, once in the kids and once in the HPI. Unless house prices crash ;-)

Just read the article. The idea of socialism having "initial stages" is taken from the words of the former leader Deng Xiaoping, who began China's economic reforms but still insisted on the primacy of Communist Party rule. What isn't usually reported in Western Media is that there are expressions of democracy here. For example, election of local councillors happened a month or two back... I was stunned to see ballot boxes and people cheerily voting, given years of "there's no democracy in Communism" coverage in the UK. If you read carefully, there's "the primacy of Communist Party rule" - i.e. the Communist Party are the government, but a lot of local power is actually in the hands of elected politicians here. And localised government has more power here than county councils in the UK - it's more like states in America, which can each set their own versions of the law on a lot of issues. Or at least, that's how it seems to me.

None of you lot have a shortcut to the Shanghai Daily in your Favourites do you?! Well, here you go: http://www.shanghaidaily.com/sp/article/20...icle_307414.htm SHANGHAI stock market ended today's trading 3.9 percent higher than yesterday, regaining some of the ground lost in yesterday's drop – the biggest in a decade. Official media reports said the government won't impose capital gains taxes on stocks and will allow overseas investors to buy more domestic equities, Bloomberg said today.

China only has about 100m quid in FX reserves don't they? That's a tenth of the UK mortgage debt, yes? So if (on average) half the 20m houses in the UK are mortgaged fully and half not at all (remember, on average), then China owns the equivalent of one tenth of half of 20m houses... one million houses... Edit to ask: or is there a more accurate way of estimating the total price of all houses in the UK?