CharlieChuck

He seems to be going round in circles there to me. If they can't buy newbuilds then the owner of the house who is selling will need a new house, that isn't increasing the availability of housing at all it'll be exactly the same. If the people using this deposit scam are currently living with parents (as I suspect most of the cases will be) then the available number of houses will actually reduce (albeit the availability of rented housing won't change). The only way this could increase the supply is if they're currently renting and buy a previously empty house that wasn't being let.

This is a crazy idea. Traditionally, one of the reasons for having to save a deposit was to prove to the building society that you could budget and cope with regular repayments. We seem to have lost sight of this over the past 15 years and now just chuck money at anyone who the lending multiples stack up to (or don't in the case of self certification). That's one of the things that got us into this mess in the first place, lending to the wrong people. Perhaps the only saving grace is the amounts look small compared to the number of first time purchases each month. Though as thesse dropped to only 10,000 or so the other month, The other question I have is, why the hell have councils got spare money slushing around that they can lock into loans for mortgages? They're either charging too much or collecting the money off us too early. Perhaps another idea would be if they invested their sacred pension funds in loans to first time buyers and any losses hit them instead of the taxpayer. Somehow I don't think they'd be keen on that idea.

Have to agree with that. I just hope protective gear for the 'volunteers' has improved over the years.

Oil falling has confused me a bit too. Maybe it's speculators closing their long positions? Long term I'd almost certainly expect oil and gas to go up.

I was just about to post that. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12307698

It wouldn't take a massive percentage of high earners in the 18,000 to skew the average wage stat. 3000 @ £100,000 a year and 15,000 at £35,000 a year averages out at £54,000 odd.

I thought some of them weren't, but wasn't sure. As others have said, much of the difference must be due to broken or failed chains. I'm sure when I bought a house ten years ago my mortgage was approved about a month before contracts were exchanged, there's plenty can go wrong in between.

I don't think all mortagage providers are in the CML, not sure though.

I decided yesterday to close my current account with them. I've been meaning to do it for years, but I think they've finally gone far too far. Where to open an account though, that's another question? What I might do is leave 20p in there so they still send out statements which in effect will lose them money on me. A bit petty I know, but I like to be awkward.

Is this a way of trying to appease voters over bank bonuses? Technically if this happened (for RBS), 60% of the public could group together and vote off all the directors, refuse to accept the annual report, scrap bonuses etc. If we don't vote against it, how can we later moan of the bonuses they get.

I can't remember a reason either. I took it as being the hedgies last ditched attempt to offset some of their other losses. I can remember Gordon Brown reassuring us it had nothing to do with speculation, which made me even more sceptical. I'm totally without anything to back this up, but I can remember threads on here and reports of tankers filled with oil stuck at sea because there wasn't enough demand ( I could be remembering the timing of this wrong though). I suppose another reason could be a refining shortage? I'm sure speculation added to the problem.

Wasn't it a combination of specualtion by the hedgies and short covering?

It's not the knocking down of the cottages I object to, if it really would bring a benefit then the nation needs it. I just don't get who will use the high speed trains. If anyone wants to get from one of the coutnry to the other quickly they fly. It'll still be cheaper and quicker to fly after the railways built (except maybe London to Birmingham but who the hell wants to go there in a hurry) Hopefully they're considering this for other reasons: nuclear reactors, upgrading or increasing the number of motorways, building industrial estates near motorway junctions and larger roads, plus anything else that improves our efficency. I guess it will also apply to the high yield dairy farm that recently got refused permission.

The cynic in me thinks this (or something like this) is being done in advance of pushing through the new high speed rail links.

Picture 9 just says it all .

The money lent is circulating, but a similar amount of money is destroyed when the bank posts a bad debt provision or writes it off. The net effect is zero. e.g. Man A borrows £1000 spends it and can't repay it. Man B pays £1000 in interest on his mortgage The bank (eventually) has to post a loss of £1000 on the bad debt, and makes a profit of £1000 on the loan interest. These two cancel each other out. The £1000 made in interest can't be re-lent by the bank.

As others have said, very good post. I can't disagree that we're all going to get relatively a lot poorer. It's just a question of whether they can get away with it for long enough to avoid a crash. Wage inflation is the key and I can't see any of that on the horizon. With wages not matching commodity inflation the trickle of repossessions and forced sellers can only increase every month, albeit slowly, until we see nominal falls in the 1% mark again. After the inital falls of the 90's crash, most of the actual reduction came via inflation. It's a different world now, labour is more mobile, and within Europe the mobility is uncontrollable. This is going to run on for years and until our wages are competitive enough (or low enough) compared to the rest of the world I can't see an improvement. I only wish I'd bought more NS&I Index Linked bonds before they withdrew them.

Page 149 of their report has the UK mortgage details RBS report Couple of choice bits The UK mortgage portfolio totalled £92.6 billion at 31 December 2010, an increase of 8% from 31 December 2009, due to continued strong sales growth and lower redemption rates in historical terms The arrears rate (more than 3 payments in arrears, excluding repossessions and shortfalls post property sale) increased slightly to 1.7% at 31 December 2010 The number of properties repossessed in 2010 was 1,392 compared with 1,251 in 2009. the proportion of balances in negative equity at 31 December 2010 standing at 6.9% Bearing in mind the size of their mortgage book, that's a lot of people in negative equity. Ireland seems to be a looming problem for RBS, page 152 onwards, with Ulster Bank Group and its 22bn of mortgages. 37% of these are more than 90% LTV. They're going to cause some big future losses for us.

January is always a good month because of Corporation tax ( a lot of companies year ends are 31 March do their tax is due 1 Jan) and Self employed tax is due the end of Jan. Last year there were various time to pay measures in place whereby anyone who could use a phone could basically get three months to pay their taxes. This year's much tighter, there's higher penalites for not paying on time.

I worked in one doing their accounts, albeit 12 years ago. From what I remember wages were nearly 70% of the income. Staffing levels are (or were - it might have changed since) set by the local authority, i.e. for each ten residents/patients one Nurse and two care workers had to be on duty. At night time fewer staff are needed. It was always a struggle to employ staff, that was before the influx of Eastern Europeans though. The place made a loss unless it was over 80% full. Considering the very short terms of some of the residents, it rarely made a profit. The rate the local authority paid then was about £330 a week, roughly £17,000 a year. It must be at least double that now. I'm not trying to justify the prices, when I first started there I thought it was overpriced, but after seeing the books and the number of staff needed, you realise just how much money is needed to pay the wage bill, and that's before rent (or loan interest), heating etc.

The missing bit for me which people aren't reporting or talking about is why the company went under. No one wanted to buy the cars. It wouldn't have mattered if the exec's paid themselves £36mn or £36 in the four years, the company still would have gone under. Why did no one want the cars? That's the important question to me. No one abroad wanted a british car and it seemed no one here wanted to buy a british car. Bad design, price or the stigma of a british made car? I don't know. That doesn't mean I don't think they knew exactly what would happen back in 2000, they took a small risk and got an enormous reward for it. As far as I remember no one else wanted it back in 2000, or the terms other people were offering were even worse. As someone said above, the real winner here was BMW.

I think it's more relevant to the UK than early morning Bloomberg. You have to take everything with a pinch of salt though, everyone's got their own agenda. I don't get to watch it that often but I always choose it over Bloomberg in the morning.

This all mirrors what I'm seeing (SME - transport) . Sales are falling every month, customers are stretching payments terms to the limit, on average we're getting paid 30 days later than 6 months ago. One customer has gone under a few months ago, not a huge loss but still a loss. There's another four that I'm very concerned about. Credit Insurance is now non-existant except for companies you don't need it on. We're basically at the point where where a big decision has to be made, stop trading with overdue customers and lose the sales, which means downsizing, or keep offering more credit hoping they'll get through it. I want the former, the MD wants the latter, he'll win, but it's the wrong decision. I can see a chain reaction coming which takes out a lot of small companies at once, from raw materials through packaging etc to the supply chain. You could argue we need this, we've been living beyond our means for years, and it's a necessary adjustment, but when you're sat in the middle of it doesn't make the bigger picture a comfortable thought.

I've got to admit I'm not comfortable being long at the moment, but then I seem to have called everything else wrong this year. What little longs I did buy a month or so ago I'm know out of. I don't fancy going short myself, as I really can see some possibility of this running another 5-10% higher before it turns down.

I've heard this a few times over the past few days, reminds me of the Bradford & Bingley 'split'. I'm wondering if this is some back door way of increasing lending. If you remove the failing loans from the good bank(nationalise them), then the good bank can lend more as it doesn't have to hold as much in reserve against the bad, or potentially bad, loans. If you time this right it could lead to a boost of availability, which wouldn't last long, but could be very handy for them leading up to a general election.