Sunday 28 August 2016

Proof that the Bank of England has absolutely no F*****g Clue...

Here

What an utter twat.

Update: 13:25

Proof that he's a twat. (Well, one proof factor in a whole range of factors).

Here

And this section is always worth a laugh for its endless contradictory news items.

Here

27 comments:

paulc156 said...

Well I see my own 2nd property very much as an alternative to the very small pension that I have just started to cash in. Haldane gets an 84k pension which the article says requires a pension pot of £3.5m. I imagine that with a bit of imagination you could get that sort of return from buy to let for a about half of that figure and get a lorry load of capital gains thrown into the bargain. Property versus private pensions is surely a no brainer in favour of property. Apologies in advance if this post fails to meet stringent stay on topic criteria set by the higher echelons...

Lola said...

P156. yep. O/t. But read what he says. He clearly has no clue that it's his employers own stupid policies that drive land price rises. He thinks that building more houses will bring their price down. Which everyone on here knows it won't. He clearly also doesn't understand which factors of production increase wealth and which one does not.

Rich Tee said...

paulc156: "Well I see my own 2nd property very much as an alternative to the very small pension that I have just started to cash in...Apologies in advance if this post fails to meet stringent stay on topic criteria set by the higher echelons..."

It doesn't break the rules AFAIK but personally it makes me despair at this country and worry greatly about the future, because the older gneration can only secure their retirement by screwing the younger generation.

Ben F said...

Rich Tee - agreed completely. Sadly many of the older generation lack any morals. The Century of the Self nailed it.

Ben F said...

Also another interpretation:

1. BoE spends 10 years calling for govt to grasp the nettle.
2. Govt mildly perturbs BTL
3. BoE sees the entire pyramid scheme falling again, knows this time it's a ropes and lamp-post job, panics and urges everyone into BTL.

Lola said...

Benn. It's piano wire and lamp-post. Small point. But important

Mark Wadsworth said...

PC156, the penny has dropped - you're a Homey out of naked self-interest. Most BTL landlords are.

Mark Wadsworth said...

As to the BoE person, he has been correct so far, hasn't he?

Turnbull2000 said...

@Rich Tee "because the older gneration can only secure their retirement by screwing the younger generation."

The wealth that the older generations are acquiring will be inherited by the young. Millions of youngsters will eventually inherit not only a main property, but one or two rentals too.

Mark Wadsworth said...

TB2000, not only is that untrue, even if it were true, that makes things worse not better.

That means that their heirs will be ruining the lives of future generations as well.

Mark Wadsworth said...

RE the second item, it has long been known that developers drip new homes onto the market at a rate of one-ninth as many existing homes that are bought and sold.

A couple of years ago, there were about 500,000 plots with unused planning, it's now climbed to 750,000 for obvious reasons - govt handing out permits like confetti and developers only using half of them.

Lola said...

TB2000. Oh come on now! That's wildly inaccurate. In any event those inheritors have already paid for what they are getting way of high rents.

Mark Wadsworth said...

There's a headline in your third link saying: "House building could fall by 8pc due to Brexit, warns Shelter"

That is quite plausible, if turnover of existing homes goes down 8% because of Brexit (fewer foreign 'investors') then new output will also fall by 8%. We might still end up with a situation where overall more British residents can buy a home.

benj said...

@ Turnbull2000

Fairness and efficiency are two sides of the same coin. So, your comment that the young will "inherit it all" anyway misses the point. An economy that penalises wealth creation by taxing it, and where land rents are not equally shared incurs massive dead weight losses as well as excessive inequality.

From which springs an overweening and costly State apparatus in order to try and mitigate some of the symptoms caused by such economic dysfunction.

Unfortunately, bad customs are passed down throughout the generations. Perhaps we should put end our Homeownerist culture before we criticise other natations for there own cultural failings?

Lola said...

BJ. +1

DBC Reed said...

Rather a brilliantly assembled posting from Lola: makes a crushing argument from a succession of quotations .
I seem to remember Haldane saying a few months back that he didn't understand the pensions industry; seems like he doesn't understand why we have, or need one.Rather a basic blind spot from someone in his position !

Ben F said...

Wow it's not often I find someone still thick enough to advance the "youth will inherit" line. Must be like living in treacle, being *that* wrong! Toe curling.

Graeme said...

Given that pension funds and insurance companies are among the biggest holders of gilts and the BoE is holding interest rates down, is it surprising that BoE official says that property is the better asset to hold? To my mind, the next "shock" waiting to happen is a massive hike in insurance premiums because of low interest rates. At the moment, the Government is able to take the flak on the BHS pension fund deficit by blaming it on nasty Mr Green. Sooner or later, someone will connect the dots and see that the deficit is largely an artefact of BoE interest rate policy. If this coincides with a massive hike in insurance premia/ms....apathy as usual I expect.

paulc156 said...

MW. I rented my 2nd property for several years, my father rented it for several decades prior to that. It was/is a place of work with residential above. Landlord always refused to sell until mid nineties.
The mortgage was slightly less than the rent at the time so was a no brainer. So I fell into BTL by default rather than design. Who on here would look a gift horse in the mouth?

Bayard said...

Isn't Andy Haldane the man who wants to abolish cash and bring in negative interest rates?

What the second article glosses over is that the housing market is about 1.2 million homes a year, so whether the landbankers build 143,000 houses a year, as last year or 250,000 as called for by Homey Shill charity Shelter that's really only an increase of 9%. Also conveniently glossed over are the fact that at any one time there are about half a million houses for sale in the UK.

Of course the mythical "Housing Crisis" is also trotted out. How can there be a housing crisis if the average time a home is on the market is 162 days? (stats from http://www.home.co.uk/company/stats.htm)

Lola said...

Graeme.

That's already been realised - not by the press, of course.

1. Motor premiums have not fallen (in fact increased) because insurers cannot make any return at all on their 'float'.
2. Pretty well all of financial services knows that the majority of the pension deficit at BHS is down to (a) ludicrous rules on pension scheme solvency and valuation methodology and (b) QE bond buying programme and / B of E interest rate policy. Worse than that 'premiums' aka levies for the PPF paid by solvent schemes could prejudice those schemes.

Quite frankly I just cannot see how any of this can continue. There will be a reckoning.

Mark Wadsworth said...

BenF, that's the spirit! Why don't you join us in the Young People's Party and stand as a candidate?

PC156 says "So I fell into BTL by default rather than design. Who on here would look a gift horse in the mouth?"

The last umpteen Dukes of Westminster would say the same. Does it make any difference to the tenant whether you are a Home-Owner-Ist by default or by design?

paulc156 said...

MW. You also benefit from the byzantine nature of our laws on taxation and profit from the huge deadweight costs incurred therein and are able to extract rents due to the restrictive rules imposed by your professional bodies. Lets not pretend one mans self interest is somehow purer than the other eh?

Mark Wadsworth said...

PC yes that is true.

Bayard said...

"PC156, the penny has dropped - you're a Homey out of naked self-interest. Most BTL landlords are."

Whatever P156c's beliefs, " Property versus private pensions is surely a no brainer in favour of property." is true under the present tax setup. Also those statements are tautological and wrong. If buying and renting out a second property makes you a Homey, "out of naked self-interest", ALL BTL landlords are de facto Homeys. However I can see that, given the near impossibility of saving money in any other way, it is perfectly possible to be BTL landlord out of necessity and not out of conviction. "Home-ownerism," as you yourself defined it, is a belief system, so conviction is what makes Homeys.

Home-ownerism as a belief system is one of the big obstacles to the introduction of some form of LVT. Which do you think an outcome more likely to deliver LVT - many landlords and few Homeys or many Homeys and few landlords? How many people would want to own a house if it depreciated in value like a car? That's not a hypothetical question, that has been the case for centuries at a time in the UK.

"Does it make any difference to the tenant whether you are a Home-Owner-Ist by default or by design?"

Does it make any difference to the tenant whether you are a Home-Owner-ist or not? All the tenant is interested in is whether you are a good landlord or not.

Lola said...

P156 08:58 and MW. Me too. But both MW and I campaign to overturn those 'special privileges'. A thing called the RDR happened to us, lauded by the FSA/FCA as 'pro-consumer, it had precisely the reverse effect (as I predicted it would and told the FSA/FCA so). It simply increased the rent seeking opportunities and special privileges for blokes like me. Plus QE/ZIRP has done wonders for asset owners / managers.

Haldane by not understanding is part of the problem.

Bayard said...

More evidence house price is definitely based on interest rates: http://www.swindonadvertiser.co.uk/news/14715019.House_prices_reach_new_record__says_Nationwide