The International Monetary Fund has forecast much lower growth than Darling predicted in this latest budget and pre-budget report. Which means, of course, that the public finances will be in a complete mess and goodness knows what this will mean for taxation and the public services (the Social Security budget will not be affected, though, as they mostly vote Labour, don’t they?).
Meanwhile, house prices fell in just one month by 2.5% (John Redwood has a good take on this subject here), which means if they fall by the same amount every month for the next year we will have a 30% drop, i.e. a housing market crash.
Part of my reason for not blogging for the past 4 or 5 months was stress from not being able to sell my house, until a fellow blogger (who is on my Blogroll) kindly purchased it from me as he needed to buy a home in the area. Purchasing a house at the moment is a reasonably good deal if you are in for the long-haul, and you can convince sellers not to be greedy and try to stick to the “asking price” (i.e. the over-inflated price that estate agents seek to maximise their commission). Simply do not offer anything more than 85% of the asking price.
And meanwhile the Bank of England is obsessed with keeping “low inflation” (CPI, RPI, RIP or whatever it’s called), even though we know that inflation has, well, inflated over the past 10 years.
Why is all this happening? It’s not just the credit crunch, stupid. Gordon Brown has acted a bit like a Private Equity boss, asset-stripping the UK while he was Chancellor and still doing so through his proxy, Alistair Darling, and what for? To win the 2001 and 2005 elections. Thing is, they forgot that when you asset-strip, and the chickens come home to roost, it is impossible to win the following election.
Enjoy your next 2 years, asset-strippers, because it will be quite a while after that before you get to hold the reins of Government again.
Posted by Mountjoy 9.57am
Mountjoy