No Monkey Business: a no nonsense clearing in the personal finance jungle

Why London house prices are on the move again

Calling an overvalued market is not like calling the top and it makes no difference whether the market is house prices or equities. The analogy with equities is particularly apposite today because there is little question that it is the City bonus boom that reignited London prices. London agent Lane Fox reports that nearly half the buyers of properties it sold in the last year worked in financial services. Add in the lawyers, who are also enjoying a feeding frenzy in mergers and acquisitions work, and the proportion rises to over half.

The equity link is entirely consistent with my analysis (see Property Myths in the Index) that the housing cycle has nothing to do with the supply of new homes and everything to do with the supply of money and credit. When the liquidity bubble bursts, the Deputy Prime Minister may realise he was fed drivel about housing shortages and the Chancellor may wonder whether it was really so smart to let the Bank of England make monetary policy decisions.
Stuart Fowler on 03.19.06 @ 11:48 PM GMT [">link]

Government in pension misselling scandal

So says the Parliamentary Ombudsman, Ann Abraham. It is rare to find government departments guilty of 'maladministration': it's a hard charge to stick. It did not stick with Equitable, even though the DTI clearly was not up to the task of assessing the life company's reserving adequacy, because the fault lay with Parliament's mandate to the DTI not the DTI's execution of its mandate. But in the case of the 80,000 people who lost their pension rights when their employer failed, there was no such excuse. In its desire to encourage pension scheme membership, the Government has repeatedly claimed that occupational pension scheme benefits were guaranteed. 'Guaranteed' is a term unscrupulous financial sales staff have played fast and furious with and lies behind all of the misselling scandals of recent memory.

Ann Abraham was right to stick this one on the Government. The Government is hypocritical to deny responsibility where its own regulators, the FSA, have been unforgiving of private firms who did the same. It suggest there is one rule for the private sector and another for government departments.
Stuart Fowler on 03.19.06 @ 11:31 PM GMT [">more..]

<>March 2006
S	M	T	W	T	F	S
			1	2	3	4
5	6	7	8	9	10	11
12	13	14	15	16	17	18
19	20	21	22	23	24	25
26	27	28	29	30	31

nomonkeybusiness.org

a no-nonsense clearing in
the personal finance jungle

By whom

For whom

Business connections

Why London house prices are on the move again

Government in pension misselling scandal

Topical Index:

External Links:

nomonkeybusiness.org

a no-nonsense clearing in the personal finance jungle

By whom

For whom

Business connections

Why London house prices are on the move again

Government in pension misselling scandal

Topical Index:

External Links:

a no-nonsense clearing in
the personal finance jungle