Scandal of luring first-time buyers

Gordon Brown is acting immorally by asking for rate cuts that could lead to negative equity

What are they doing over there? Gordon is in the United States and Alistair is in China: because this is global, isn't it? It's not our fault, they imply; not us, the British Government. We're trying to grapple with worldwide financial problems here.

Except the problem is not global. It's British. House prices in Britain, at six times average earnings, are too high. That's it. We all know that, we've known it for years. Property prices are nonsensical, exorbitant, unaffordable, immorally inflated by investors and a shortage of available land space to build new homes, exploited by a greedy City.

All those buying a property have known this for the past five years at least, and it has then become in their interest to hope that the boom continues. To that extent, property owners have been complicit in the financial recklessness of the past few years: easy credit built on pyramid selling. Buying houses has been a gamble, a cross-your-fingers-and- hope-for-the-best, those-mortgages- are-pretty-generous bet that many of us have indulged in.

Nothing could be more immoral, then, in the current climate, than using government efforts and taxpayers' money to encourage first-time buyers to enter the housing market in order to stabilise the dodgy situation that banks and incautious borrowers have got themselves into through overlending and overstretching themselves: row, row harder, keep us all afloat! Yet that appears to be what the Government's strategy is.

“Here's a nice deal for you, love”: Gordon Brown has turned into Del Boy, and I suppose that would make Alistair Darling his Rodney. They are trying to tempt the banks into continuing to offer cheap mortgage deals on properties that are simply not worth the astonishingly high amounts they have been flogged at in recent years. And trying to encourage you to sign up for them. The IMF says property prices are 27 per cent too high. Why would anyone with the interests of a first-time buyer at heart encourage him, or anybody else for that matter, to purchase at the top end of the market, with a long-overdue correction imminent? They will tumble into negative equity before they've finished clearing up the Valpolicella stains from the housewarming party.

It isn't as if, to most of the rest of us, a fall in house prices is such a big deal anyway. To most of us, for whom a house is a home, not part of an investment portfolio, tumbling values make sense. To most of us, the loss of 4,000 estate agents isn't much to worry about. Nor is the loss of tens of thousands of City boys.

To most of us, the housing bubble has been an alarming, nonsensical boom that we have scrabbled to keep up with for fear of being left behind, not out of greed but because we wanted a home to live in, one that we owned.

For most of us, a sharp correction will come as a blessed relief. House prices might make some sort of sense again; investors from the City and overseas will leave us alone and stop buying up the places we need to live in. A decent house in the country might become affordable once more for a local person, not just for someone from far away, paying cash.

Most of us didn't take out crazily silly mortgages (just, in my case anyway, quite silly). We were reasonably careful, we noted that prices were due to fall, we don't expect to be bailed out when they do, and we don't expect the bigger gamblers to be bailed out either. At what point did the Prime Minister dump prudence and so enthusiastically cop off with charity? Our charity, that is. You don't need to be an economist to understand that swapping debts for government bonds means the taxpayer is ultimately taking on the risk that should stay with the banks.

How dare a man who has lectured us all ad nauseam about prudence, year after year after year, now use our money to bail out the profligate? Times are tough, yes, but for most people they are tough in the day-to-day expenditure; in the purse, not the property portfolio. The pinch, for ordinary people, comes not from little falls in the nominal value of people's homes, but from day-to-day living costs: the food, the petrol, the gas and the council tax bills. It is in this context that the scrapping of the 10p rate has been so poisonous, a mean little kick at a time when people are already feeling hamstrung in their everyday spending. Globetrotting ministers wagging their fingers at the international gods of high finance are not going to fix that.

For most of us, the mortgage hasn't suddenly become wildly more expensive (coming to the end of a fixed-rate deal? Tough. What part of Two-Year Fixed Rate didn't you understand?). The house might be worth a bit less than yesterday, but so what? So is everybody else's. So is the bigger house you might want to buy one day. The majority of householders know they are still going to end up profiting from the boom of the past decade.

I said that many of us were complicit in that boom. Most complicit of all was the Chancellor at the time. Can it only be my memory that fails to recall any note of public caution from Mr Brown at the Treasury as the City high jinks fuelled his public spending splurge? As the housing market and the cheap mortgages and the loans on loans on loans floated Britain through the past few years, and Mr Brown into No 10?

Now he wobbles along on an empty bubble. It's a hellish tricky thing to steer. And not even Del Boy could sell the air in a bubble.

Source: Sunday Times

I love the comparison to Del Boy and Rodney, well Darling is a bit of a plonker. :lol: :lol: