433N
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- Joined
- 20 Jun 2017
- Messages
- 752
I don’t need or want to move, I have the house I want, fully paid off. Ironically I may well have on paper benefited as its value has climbed heavily in the last decade. However I have friends and family on good incomes who simply can’t afford property which would have been readily available to them a generation ago, that bugs me far more than the prospect of a few retirees not being able to retire to Spain.
The question is really whether your friends and family on good incomes can't afford property because of immigration or poor fiscal policy.
To say that it is the fault of immigration seems rather paradoxical. Economic migrants are, almost by definition, poorer and so how can they possibly buy houses particularly in areas where locals are complaining of being priced out of the market ? It is rather the same argument that immigrants are coming here and stealing our jobs AND our benefits.
The nub of the issue for me should be seen as the financial crisis. In the early noughties, people took on loans they couldn't afford. In the past, there would have been a house price crash and repossessions would have increased. Technically, when a mortgage is taken out, the borrower (ie. bank) has first dibs on the house if a lender defaults. But in the financial crisis, we bailed out the banks and they no longer needed cash from mortgage repayments. We pursued a fiscal policy whereby people who had over-borrowed were suddenly rewarded with cheap money via low interest rates ... thus, no house price crash. Little Britain is happy and we are all rich ... except savers and those who didn't get a house in time.
I remain unconvinced that this was the correct fiscal policy. It is sort of a Keynesian-max approach which might have worked if the cheap money stayed within the British economy to support the British economy ... but it doesn't. We are a net importer and buy imported goods, so that cheap money essentially floats abroad. For each pound spent, a few pence leaks abroad and the problem becomes compounded over many transactions. It is ironic that the Tories who always veer towards free market economics have meddled to such a large extent in the housing market.*
As a country, we are (boringly) obsessed with house price rises, neglecting the fact that if your property falls in value then any property you may wish to purchase in the future will also be lower in price.
All this has nothing to do with immigration.
The British people have a startling reluctance to put the blame where it belongs.
* I know the BoE is 'independent' of government but they are not going to be allowed to follow a completely different fiscal approach to that which the government wants are they ?
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