nowthenagain

Manchester, home of the call centre. If when a recession happens the city centre will be a wasteland, all those young professionals out of work.

US opens and up we go again. $705.3!

Just so it's in writing somewhere, I predict that this week we will see a serious collapse in global equities. Heated?! It's the momentary hysterical insanity before the train flies over the cliff edge.

Evolution is not 'chance', it is continuous improvement. Think about it in the same way as the evolution in the design of the motor car. The motor car neither arrived spontaneously as a result of a chance meeting of components, nor was spontaneously designed by some higher power. It was the product of our evolving understanding of the technology involved. This is how all living things were created, any other explanation is hopeless fantasy.

You are making another one of those assumptions again. Just as you assume that there is some sort of 'symmetry and design' in nature when in fact this is just a convenient phrase for something you have decided to see in your minds eye, you assume that we ('I and many other bears') know what is going to happen. The plain truth is that you, me, we, financiers, politicians.. no-one can know what is going to happen. In essence this is a disagreement between our fundamental beliefs. I do not believe that anyone knows the future, I am an atheist. You believe that someone can know the future, you believe in god.

Sir, you are a genius. With you at our helm Britain will be great again.

1. The excess demand is based on speculative purchasing coming from many years of easy cheap borrowing. This easy cheap borrowing is coming to an end, and so this leveraged speculation must come to an end also. 2. The net inflow of population is a result of the 10 years of growth and stability in this country. If that growth ceased (which it inevitably will) we'd quickly see a net outflow. All growth/decay cycles come to an end eventually, and the recent change in credit conditions are the turning point this time. 3. There are not insufficient properties. This is a myth used by the property owning masses to reinforce their misguided opinion that prices will keep going up. There are insufficient affordable properties but there is one quick easy way in which this problem will be fixed! Clue: It doesn't involve building. The conditions that have existed in the UK and world economies for the past 10 years, allowing continuous house price increases are coming to an end. The chief driver of these increases has been the easy availability of cheap money. It is beyond dispute that events in the past month have ended this era. Without this key element in the beneficial condition equation, house prices cannot keep on rising. In addition, house prices will not stagnate but will fall. The easy cheap money has led many people to borrow more money against property than ever before, often against 2nd or 3rd homes bought for speculative BTL reasons. Unlike in previous house price market corrections there are masses of highly leveraged properties which their owners do not live in. These houses will need to be disposed of when economic conditions turn sour (and I’m talking the rate rises that have already happened). This flood of properties from BTLers seeking to liquidate assets will flood, and quickly collapse, the market. This crash will be more like a traditional equity crash (1929,1987) than any previous housing market correction. The difference this time is market liquidity (meaning that BTL 2nd homes will not be 'sticky on the way down' as 1st homes would be)

Defensive stocks, the Japanese Yen, Gold, and Cash. In a ratio something like 10%, 10%, 40%, 50%.

Sometimes it pays to buy where the action isn't right now.

I find it fascinating how otherwise rational people (I am presuming you are otherwise rational) can place so much faith in something for which there is no proof whatsoever. In fact, it astounds me. I have thought about this a lot and I just cannot suspend common sense and believe in something so nonsensical as ‘god’. But each to their own. Like I said above, the problems only come when blind faith drags others into war and pain. Sadly religion seems to do this often.

Nobody can talk truthfully in the media because they are scared s**tless of being blamed for the crash. And so the myths self-perpetuate.. This is one of the key reasons we get these spectulative bubbles, the herding instinct of us as a species.

You've not read it. Aren't you being small minded, ignorant, and arrogant in making the above statement?

God is a concept we created up to comfort us in the face of events we don't understand. There is no god in any physical sense but if you need to think there is, as a kind of safety blanket, then so be it. The problems come when people try and impose that god, and it's philosophy of fear, on others. And... on the topic of this thread, it is foolhardy to believe that the 'elite' know what will happen but do not tell us. This is a view bred in our complacent age. Give it a few years and many of the 'elite' will have fallen, only to be replaced by a new elite. This is what has always happened. Before the great depression there was a widespread belief that the 'wise men' were never wrong in the markets and could never be wrong. By 1933 many of these people had committed suicide, many more were broke.

A barber's wage is constrained by globalisation due to the overall wage level in this country being constrained by globalisation. If the average wage of everybody in the UK is lower today than it would have been without globalisation (and it is) then the barber cannot charge as much as he could have done if all those jobs had not disappeared to India (leaving people in the UK unemployed or in lower paid jobs) / all those Eastern Europeans had not come to the UK and kept UK wages down.

Poland?

Read what I wrote. It's quoted above. Read it again. Now read what you wrote. You see? What you wrote makes no sense, it has no relation to the reality of what I wrote. You might call it reactionary nonsense! I'm not getting any further into an argument on here so won't post again on this thread!

If you truly believe that then you're a brainless moron. Think about what you're saying before you say it. I simply object to people who perhaps have a very limited scope of experience spouting racist / classist junk. My point was that if some people on this forum spent some time in the areas where Brown's 41% comes from they would be better qualified to give an opinion.

That, I fear, is what America is going to do. In a Kondratieff winter there are always major wars. In America's case the motivation will be more to confuse it's population into placing the blame for the depression at the foot of some external enemy (islamic 'terrorism') rather than the inevitable boom-bust cycle/deficiencies of capitalism.

For investment trusts in 1929 read hedge funds today. The parallels apparent between 1929 and today are stunning. The book (Galbraith, The Great Crash) also does a good job of examining the 'boosting' culture and the herding instinct of the masses when they are 'onto a good thing'. As in the monkey post above. The part about the Fed backing out of any action in early 1929 even when they could see what was happening, for fear of being blamed for the crash, is also very relevant to today.

Nope. I live close to Cheshire as it happens. Do you live in a little village perchance? I'm guessing, it's mostly white [edit: white middle class] people you live around?! I live in a big city surrounded by those pesky voters!

Another tendency of our species is to look back on everything with rose tinted spectacles.. i'm a he btw. (so that's the mrs brown theory out the window!)

I think that a problem we all suffer, as a species, is short-sightedness. If anyone remembers Britain in the early 90's or, god forbid, the period 1970-1982, then you would surely see the last 10 years as a halcyon age? I get into debates with many people on this topic but, to the ordinary person, the last ten years have seen massive rebuilding of Britain, a revolution and massive rebuilding in healthcare, and full employment. Yes there have been some hiccups along the way but any administration would suffer these and lots (eg low interest rates and the bubble that has built up) have been out of Brown's control (Greenspan / Bush?).

In the short term the world will enter depression, in the longer term the Eastern world will clamber out of that depression in much better condition than the West and come to dominate. We are at the beginnings of an historical paradigm shift.

I would vote for El Gordo. 10 years growth, 10 years full employment, vastly improved schools and hospitals. His record speaks for itself. Versus that Eton educated Black Wednesday oick David Cameron. Experience? Leadership? Party firmly behind him and together?! Well, none of those things! Haaaar! It's not even a contest and most people will see it that way. This forum does not represent the general population. If it did I fear we'd be run by the BNP.. No politician in power for 10 years can avoid problems. Thatcher had Black Monday and a subsequent deep recession. All previous PM's had similar or worse problems during their tenures. Gordo's done well. We should be supporting him at this diffcult time!