UK Landlord Forum / Life

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7092348.stm

Its tough to know who to believe right now. For every positive article there's a negative one. It leaves me wondering if half of this is just spin by all those who generally benefit from a robust housing market - the estate agents, the mortgage lenders etc. Are they just trying to apply pressure via their media press releases (which seem to be triggering a frenzy) to get the government to drop interest rates so they can continue feeding the bubble? And on that basis can we believe their analysis of how dire things are?

Equally there's a lot of speculators who would benefit from a "housepricecrash".

What particularly narks me right now, actually, is that while consumers have taken out quite high debt lately and some of it was undoubtedly unwise, the "sub-prime" investment issues are entirely of the bank's making, but those who probably made those choices are long gone with their annual bonuses, soaking up the sun somewhere obscure. I can see that "the consumer" is going to get tarred for this ("damn those crazy people, taking out bigger mortgages to try and afford somewhere to live"), but people will if they can and the purpose of financial regulators is to stop banks abusing situations like this.

And it doesn't look like they have.

So enough perhaps of the fat cat "oh I'll resign now and look honourable" bo**ocks. How about some resignations from the regulators, who obviously haven't been regulating very effectively at all?


V

I completely agree. It's so tough to know what condition the market is in right now. Whichever way the market swings, someone will benefit. It's hard to tell if someone is actually projecting reality, or projecting information that will help their own cause.

I've always wondered- why did the regulators let things get so bad? Obviously the consumers have to take the blame for getting themselves into ridiculous financial agreements, but the regulators could have prevented it so consumers didn't have the opportunity to do so! I don't understand why things were allowed to get so "dangerous"