House Prices (2)
Recently I posted a graph of UK house prices, commenting that something seemed to be changing in the UK housing market.
More recent figures, such as this graph, show that indeed something is changing. The question now is if this will be sustainable.
A lot will depend I think on GDP and unemployment figures in weeks and months to come. If people believe the worst is over, then this will mean some price stability or even growth...
The BBC Box
I've been following the BBC Box for some time now and thought I'd post about it here.
Apparently, the BBC has painted a container with its branding and fitted it with a GPS tracker, mapping its route over an entire year and talking about global trade.
This started at a time when global trade was booming and the theme was how the box travelled full from Asia and empty back to it.
Things are taking their toll over time though, and the global recession hit (perhaps as a result of this trend).
The box has been left empty in a yard since April as the haulage company has no shipping orders to fulfill. The recession has reduced world trade significantly in recent months, worryingly so as the collapse in world trade following the 1929 crash brought about the depression that ensued.
Pay back time
It's funny how when people were borrowing endlessly, nobody was worried. Mortgage equity withdrawal has been increasing for years before the bubble burst. Few analysts were worried about this - it was a new era when money would be forever cheap and plenty.
Now, customers don't like the idea of paying 7% interest when the Bank of England has dropped its own rates to record lows, and have started the painful process of clearing the debt. If we are to return to stability, this may take years. Unless of course inflation kicks in to reduce the value of this debt. Paying back the debt means less spending, and of course this has the analysts disturbed about the effects on the real economy.
The graph from The T elegraph tells part of the story.
This would suggest things may soon be back to equilibrium.
What it doesn't say is that these positive bars in 2007 stretch back almost a decade (from The Economics Blog):
