angry councillor face

Arkady

@Mindarola: I cn nevver splle grammer.<br>

Ali

<P>I can't type, spell  or have much understanding of grammar  as was lucky enough to have been at school in the early  days of Shirley Williams  comprehensive schools   I have to use Explorer 7 at work .  I can't cut and paste from Word as the control characters come  up on the post. What hope do I have ?</P>

Ali

and apolgies for the misspelling of your name a c is nowhere near a k on a qwerty keyboard !

Arkady

Nice Shirley Williams dig.<br>

Ali

How do you square government policy of selling of even more social housing through the extension of right to buy  that is going to be announced in the budget ?

andy

I see Shirley Williams walking on the street almost every day. (not in SGR, obv)

Papa

Brilliant, I scan read that last comment as 'I see Andy Williams walking on the street almost every day'<br>

Arkady

'Right to buy' is an excellent way of getting people on to the housing ladder, as long as the council stock is being replaced.<br>

checkski

As long as.

Ali

<P>I like the wheeze to provide government gaurantees for morgages for new build houses, should ensure  a price increase in that sector and more flow through of government funding into the house builders profits. It will be good that some folks will get help but I think  this  is what  the US did before sub prime happend.  It is another example of the free market not working as they wil not accept the risk as that is now transferred onto the tax payers.  I thought the free market was to be the savoiur.</P> <P>We are also  going to get lots more inflation,low interest rates etc once the Canadian chap turns up in the BoE  </P> <P> </P> <P> </P>

Papa

I am somewhat divided on the mortgage help idea. <br><br>Part of me thinks it is good to help those unable to raise the massive deposits needed to buy and encourage some more new home building for owner occupiers - as long as it is decent quality rather than the new-build flat buy-to-let boom we saw before 2007.<br><br>However, I am not certain replacing the Bank of Mum and Dad with the Bank of George is the solution, and I am certain that reflating the property market is not the way out of Britain's economic mess that was broadly driven by an over-inflated property market.<br><br>The US sub prime thing was different. Banks thought they had devised new ways of spreading risk on mortgages at the same time as being able to borrow money very cheaply and then get the mortgages they had already lent on off their books.<br><br>They started making money by repackaging them and selling them, then people made more money by trading them and dicing them up again and ultimately no one knew what was in them or what they were worth.<br><br>While everyone was making money, that was fine and in order to keep generating these assets to trade banks had to keep writing more mortgages. They ran out of suitable candidates and so started offering them to more and more unsuitable candidates, the classic Ninja borrower loans - No Income, No Job or Assets.<br><br>Then the bubble burst and demand for mortgages, homes and trading assets based on them collapsed and so did the market.<br><br>The US situation was exacerbated by there being very little planning control, so a huge number of new homes were built, massively bumping up supply. Also, in many cases there was no recourse to recover debt owed after repossession. So people unable to afford their properties could just walk away and not be chased for the mortgage debt.<br><br>We don't have either of those things here and the Help to Buy scheme is unlikely to trigger a sub-prime style problem. <br><br>What it may do is drive house prices even higher before the last bubble has been worked out of the system. That spells very bad news when the next bubble eventually bursts, which they always do.<br>

andy

The problem isn't demand, it's supply. Underwriting mortgages is a crackers idea. All it does is push prices up. <div><br></div><div>The treasury seems to take the view that rather than bail out banks that have made bad loans, it will make the bad loans itselves directly.</div>