Merry Christmas

Quak Quak

One thing that would make the downturn worse - beside subsidies of to car industry -, trade barriers. And here we go :

With the global economy facing its worst recession in decades, protectionism is a growing risk.

PS: it seems that the credit crisis, would be over the worse.no it's time for the "real" economy to adjust.

Are we replaying the 1930's?

Yesterday the Fed has announced that it lowered it's target rate in the 0-0.25 range. But the markets did react really that well.

Maybe first you have to keep in mind the effective rate was already in that range. This annoucement was more about signaling that Bernanke means business, which is not that surprising considering what the man wrote about Roosevelt's.

Roosevelt's specific actions were, I think, less important than his willingness to be aggressive and to experiment -- in short, to do whatever was necessary to get the country moving again.

But seeing how the markets reacted there are some doubts on the effect of the quantitative easing... Maybe that's because one of the big problem right now, like during the great depression is uncertainty.

Why would you invest in he future when you don't know the rules of the game, and when the gouvernement and the fed are shooting loud and clear that they would do anything?

Would not doing anything be better? It's been pointed out that during the great depression the USA had really active president, and Canada really passive. And guess what Canada would have done better!

I don't think anybody know what will happen, but I think we will learn a lot in the next years.


PS: even if the problem are worse than in the 30's it won't be worse except if protectionnism go back on the table.

The guild season 2 starts today

you can watch the first episode of The Guild season 2 here.

Great first one, watching season if you have not done already is STRONGLY recommended.

How to turn a recession into a depression

Let's start by bailing out industry that produce good that are not wanted by consumer, who said car manufacturer?

Wait for the next one! in particular look for tax on import or wage control.

Cavehill walk 3

Cavehill walk 3, originally uploaded by ar271.

Cavehill autumn trees 1

Cavehill autumn trees 1, originally uploaded by ar271.

Fort McArts

View from Fort McArts, originally uploaded by ar271.

The docks

Twilight Cavehill view on the docks 2, originally uploaded by ar271.

Harland & Wolfe

Harland & Wolfe 2, originally uploaded by ar271.

Lovely Northern Ireland

Cavehill walk 7, originally uploaded by ar271.

The crisis of the century

or for the first 10years at least ...

What are the fundemental causes?

Those are fast to point out at Greed or Deregulation ... easy target but almost certainly wrong ones.

Greed is the natural motivation of the market, it's everywhere but not all market go bust. Concerning deregulation or free

market, just keep in mind tat the financial market are certainly one the must regulated market.

So where to start as a part of the explanation?

- Regulation : it seems that it gave incentive for bank to go into all these fancy product and hide the risk
- Gouvernement : in a lot of country the gvt push the property buble - in the USA with the sponsored Fannie and Freddie

Ac, in the UK with the buy to let -
See here for a good presentation.

But we should not forget that the Fed, and the numerous restart of the economy might also explain part of it

Are we going to a great depression?

Maybe, if you see gouvernement starting to raise tariff, stop immigration, lobying for higher salary that's a good sign

that we are in the big dark road ...

Check that out if you're not frighten already


What's next?
Prob deflation, good for people with cash, bad for people with debt.

What gouvernement can do? .
Stay out of the way is probably a good idea. The Paulson plan was a joke use by MP to bargain for tax money. The bill

started at 3 pages ended up more than 400...
Saying that, the intervention by the uk gvt - recapitalisation - is considered as the only way to help. But the devil is

in the details so beware ...

My Advice?

Save, pay your mortage, get liquid.

Happy 2009 !

My Result at The Political Compass

Economic Left/Right: 5.38
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.56

The spooky action at distance that does not travel ...

I was reading Metro this morning, and that have a wee article about a new study published in Nature.

They kind of present the study as if it did measure the speed of an "instant", which it did not. If you read the abstract you'll see that the expirement was a Bell test, which is a way to prove that reality as understood in the classic sense is broken.

And while doing this experiment they did measure that if this phenomenum was due to communication the information would have to travel more than 10,000 times the speed of light.

But there is no information transmitted in these experiment, if you look at the Multiverse explanation - I don't know how the Copenhagen interpretation.

You don't affect the other particle by observing the first one, it's the oposite. Your observation makes you entangle to the system, and your universe would only be able too have one outcome.

Another unintended consequence of the benchmarks ?

Trains into London now slower than in 1987 - or is just a ruse?



Rail passengers face slower train journeys into London than 21 years ago.

Popular services to the capital are slower than in 1987 despite rail network and rolling stock improvements.

Critics say rail firms are "padding out" timetables by adding a few minutes to journeys between key stations to ensure trains arrive on time.

Physical move

The physical me is transmoving himself to Belfast, NI next month. I guess the transport got the better of him. And the fact that place that will accommodate him is a gorgeous 2 B flat in the city center is not for nothing.

Obviously in London he will come back every so often, especially in November for the Mighty Boosh play!

Because he wants to be an achiver.

The dirty war

Despite hundreds of millions of pounds spent each year on UK drug enforcement activity, the commissioners argue there is "remarkably little evidence of its effectiveness".

Drug markets, they conclude, are "extremely resilient" and all the criminal justice activity has had "little street-level impact".

Indeed they go further, warning that law enforcement efforts can have a significant negative impact.

The war on drugs

Halifax: Quarterly report

Northern Ireland down 14.6% Q1 to Q2 !!!

That does hurt ...

More data here


PS: Greater London QtQ -4.3%

Climate documentary 'broke rules' or Not ?

The BBC says :

The Great Global Warming Swindle, a controversial Channel 4 film, broke Ofcom rules, the media regulator says. In a long-awaited judgement, Ofcom says Channel 4 did not fulfil obligations to be impartial and to reflect a range of views on controversial issues. The film also treated interviewees unfairly, but did not mislead audiences “so as to cause harm or offence”. Plaintiffs say the Ofcom judgement is “inconsistent” and “lets Channel 4 off the hook on a technicality.”

But as McIntyre points out :



Ofcom, the U.K. television regulator, has rendered a remarkable decision. People interested in what was actually decided will, unfortunately, have to consult the original judgment at Ofcom, rather than the BBC accounts (here, here) of the judgment.

....

Ofcom summarized their judgement as follows:

In summary, in relation to the manner in which facts in the programme were presented, Ofcom is of the view that the audience of this programme was not materially misled in a manner that would have led to actual or potential harm. The audience would have been in no doubt that the programme’s focus was on scientific and other arguments which challenged the orthodox theory of man-made global warming. Regardless of whether viewers were in fact persuaded by the arguments contained in the programme, Ofcom does not believe that they could have been materially misled as to the existence and substance of these alternative theories and opinions, or misled as to the weight which is given to these opinions in the scientific
community.

Ofcom considers that, although the programme may have caused viewers to challenge the consensus view that human activity is the main cause of global warming, there is no evidence that the programme in itself did, or would, cause appreciable potential harm to members of the public …

Channel 4, however, had the right to show this programme provided it remained within the Code and – despite certain reservations – Ofcom has determined that it did not breach Rule 2.2. On balance it did not materially mislead the audience so as to cause harm or offence.

Not in breach of Rule 2.2.


Ofcom Decision: A Humiliating Defeat for Bob Ward and the Myles Allen 37

So who's right? both?

Maternity leave

-- update

So what do I think ... Not much, was just surprise that the uk were that "good" on the maternity leave. Too bad for the father though ...

Joss is back! and he's trying something really, really new.

What is a recession?

It's in all the paper, it's smell bad and it sounds like we should avoiding it by what is it?

It's actually not that bad, it's mainly going back to earth, following a misallocation of investment and work, we need to reallocate the labour to what actually people needs and pay for all the money thought they had but end up not having.

It is manifested by bug lay off, but don't be scared. these lay off are part of the redistribution of the production system. They are mainly located on the company that were only working because of temporally local circumstances like the bubble.

It's in the end a good thing, realigning the production to what people really need, not to what the producer thought they need.

How did how prices get that high?

Here you go




Liar Loan! already on 2004 ...

Found on the Infamous House Price Crash site.

The economy of transportation

A great great podcast about transportation.

It is about Santiago, Chile. There are a lot of anecdotes that Londoners would empathize with.

London lack of supply!

Lots of Londoners think that London is - or was - immune to the House Price Crash. Lack of supply, millionaires who don't care about prices ... London price would not fall.

Would it?

I think that Pimlico is kind of central London ...

"Flat I bought for £175,000 last year is now worth less than £100,000"

It's no more a lack of supply but much more a lack of demand, 10 years of lie are coming to an end. Get ready for the british version of the credit crunch.

Is the world Austrian?

As the global crisis continue to unfold I remember a podcast on econ talk where Pete Boettke argue that the crisis we are living now is the consequence of trying to control aggregate, that are just a proxy to the reality. Central Bank would have postponed the needed adjustment by fine tuning the aggregate, every time giving incentive for people to create new bubble.

If that's the case we need to reread Hayek and reduce economic intervention and government drastically.

Unfortunately most people will ask for the opposite, they will ask for an extension of government intervention. Which would be like giving more horse power to a blind driver.

Personal Finance Tip

Don’t save too much.

Read at Freakonomics for more information, originally from Milton Friedman

French Corruption

Virgin's Branson says 'French minister asked him for bribe'


Branson told Capital that "I took the affair to the highest authorities.

"I was advised to not to make it public and to wait until the next ministerial reshuffle. A few months later, I won my case,"

Back to the Future

In France, the leader of the Revolutionary Communist League is leading the polls.

Will France fall for a workers dictatorship?

In Defense of Sweatshops

To put things in perspective after last night Panorama :

Not only are sweatshops better than current worker alternatives, but they are also part of the process of development that ultimately raises living standards. That process took about 150 years in Britain and the United States but closer to 30 years in the Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

Europe Was Going Too Far

A paper I totally agree with at vox.

Decide what Europe should be all about

Rather than forcing more political integration down the throats of Europeans, European leaders should stop for a second and decide what Europe should be all about. We think it should be about deep economic integration and the coordination of policies with clearly identifiable cross-national externalities. Nothing more, nothing less.

Europe? What for?

For the pro european there is no question as what is Europe for. Europe is a necessity, it should exist. It solve all the problem war, stability, growth. It's great! Look at Ireland it was a bunch of poor rag now it's a dynamic country thanks to Europe!

Whoo stop I say. Are you sure about all that? What does Europe mean? Where is it going? What is the success of Ireland due to - I would guess instution change and low taxes -.

Europe has been promoted by the pro European has the inevitable sense of history, no wonder people are skeptical. They don't even know where it's going, they don't know if they want to go there.

I personnaly don't think that a political Europe is possible, even desirable, there are too many differences between countries. Anyway it's probably time to propose clear project to the people not technocratic mumbo jumbo.

A stand up for freedom

David Davis to resign as MP

Freedom Fighter v Bottler Brown

A blow for justice


From The Economist

The ludicrous benchmark philosophy

Arresting or fining someone for a trifling offence - such as a child stealing a Mars bar - is a good way of hitting the target and pleasing the Home Office.

Amazingly, the chocolate theft ranks as highly as catching a killer.

Miss Sergeant says performance-related bonuses of between £10,000 and £15,000 a year for police commanders depend partly on reaching such targets.

This leads them to put pressure on frontline officers to make arrests for the most minor misdemeanours.

Officers said at the end of a month, when there was pressure to hit the target for that period, they would pursue young men as the most likely 'offenders'.

See here

My favorite "One officer told how he was pressed to charge children playing with a tree with 'harassment'."

...

Another month, another drop

House prices fall at fastest rate for 17 years
The slump in Britain's house prices accelerated in May to the fastest level since the Nationwide began records 17 years ago.

The price of an average house fell 2.5 per cent in the month, making the seventh consecutive monthly fall in prices, the longest downward slope since the housing recession of 1992.

In the year, 4.4 per cent has been wiped off the value of homes, the biggest annual fall since December 1992 when the price fall reached 6.3 per cent.

Really sharp drop that surprised even the big bear.

We are now 6.9% lower from the top in October.
See the press release.


--- Update 5th June 2008

Halifax confirm the drop.

House prices: Market sliding faster than in the 1990s recession.

Boris plans to 'Oysterise' overground rail services by next May

Transport for London chiefs have told the new Mayor that his less confrontational approach is already paying dividends with train firms and will as a result rapidly speed up the spread of the system.

Mr Johnson said: "This is excellent news for thousands of First Great Western passengers and takes us a step closer to making Oyster the only ticket you'll need to travel in London.

"Transport for London is investing £40 million in new Oyster equipment and I now urge the remaining train operating companies to get on board, agree their deals and open up Oyster for all Londoners."

What! Boris can do thing better that Ken! Sure we are not gonna say thanks to the "Don't blame me, I didn't vote Boris" people.

UK house prices see annual fall

Prices fell by 1.1% in April, the sixth monthly decline in a row, and were down 1% from the levels seen in April 2007, the building society said.

Via BBC

Ps: the top of the index was October 2007 371.1 now it is 355.5, that's a 4.2% drop from the top.

So what with the housing market?

For the last 8 years the price of property have been going up and up and a bit down but soon after more up and up. Until a month ago few were the ones who were expecting that it will go down. Brick and Mortar always go up!

Since the last 2 months the picture has changed totally, so how come people did not see that coming, how come people went that high! how come it did not crash in 2005? Is the slump the consequence of the credit crunch, is it the fault of the American?

All these phenomenons are related. In the USA the end of the house price bubble started the credit crunch, but the credit bubble is responsible for part of the house bubble, and the house bubble is responsible for the credit bubble.

These two market were reinforcing each other on the boom, now they are sinking each other in the slump.

Now for the UK, the banks saw that coming, after the fall of the MBS in USA, bank in Europe started checking their position, step by step incrementing their standard. Preparing for the shock of repossessions and bankruptcies – it is not there yet btw -. The pull out of the 100% , 125% mortgages, is not due to the credit crunch it's due to the realisation by the banks that the risk on these product was heavily underestimated. They won't be able to pay back, they will default more than expected. Therefore more people were able to buy than there should have been, a lot of the demand was created by the underpricing of the mortgages and that lifts house prices. That's probably what happened in 2005, a lot of people were given access to mortgage they should not have. That follow the boom of the MBS.

And that why the government can't save the housing market, because this not the credit crunch that pull mortgages of the market, it's a repricing of the risk, a return to normal condition after the credit bubble.

Keep that in mind

66% fall corrects a 200% increase
60% fall corrects a 150% increase
50% fall corrects a 100% increase
40% fall corrects a 60% increase
30% fall corrects a 42% increase
20% fall corrects a 25% increase
10% fall corrects a 11% increase

House prics "gap"

Via FT

It's all over paper/tv/radio

House prices 'see sharp decline'

Is it the start of a new phase of accelerating downward trend? Hard to say, put the trend is definitly tend, a lot of people bet their home that it would not. That's only the beginning - see the mortgage market.

Talking about mortgage market, it's more of a return to normal than a crunch for the moment. Who could think that a 125% mortgage is a sensible idea?

2 days later

South London

London Zoo

Scary title

House prices 'will crash soon': Bank chiefs warn YOUR home is overvalued by 30 per cent


UK housing - “Sell everything!”

Cost of living

What is the cost of living index?

The cost-of-living index, or general index, shows the difference in living costs between cities. The cost of living in the base city is always expressed as 100. The cost of living in the destination is then indexed against this number. So to take a simple example, if London is the base (100) and New York is the destination, and the New York index is 120, then New York is 20% more expensive than London. Similarly, if London is the base and Budapest is the destination, and the Budapest index is 80, than the cost of living in Budapest is 80% of London's.
...

The figures below indicate the sum of individual weights attributed to all the items which compose each of the index categories. They are as follows:

Shopping basket   25.0 
Alcoholic beverages   3.5 
Household supplies   4.5 
Personal care   4.0 
Tobacco   2.5 
Utilities   6.5 
Clothing   13.0 
Domestic help   3.5 
Recreation & entertainment   18.0 
Transportation   19.5 
TOTAL   100.0

Pouvoir d'achat = PIB

Pour les francophones tres interessants article sur le lien entre le pouvoir d'achat et la croissance

Le pouvoir d’achat n’existe pas, chez Optimum

For the non-french speaker, it basically says that increasing the purchase power is equivalent to increasing the GDP, so we should evaluate policy on their capacity to increase GDP.

The report on immigration

I agree with that "absence of proof is not proof of absence".

There are loads of hidden effect, like better service in the Pubs, restaurant better quality of the plumbing labour, that are not taken into account because hard to price.

If the Fed is responsible for the crisis

We should get rid of it.

Alex Tabarrok points to that article while criticizing the position of those who thinks the Fed is responsible but propose more regulation to solve the problem.

Life, Book and Survival

In the book I read recently 3 are Economic centric subject. They are

- The Natural Economist, Robert H. Frank : nice to read applied economy, but kind of repeat it self over and over as the stories are kind of not that different. Nice read though but not as a continuous read.
- Logic Of Life, Tim Harford : I love it, a must read. Well written, funny. Always go from the example to the theory behind.
- Discover Your Inner Economist, Tyler Cowen : Good read, in my opinion it lacks the exposition of the theorical framework. Does not give much insight in the Inner Economist.

If you have to read one go for the Logic of Life.

Not on the economist list, another unmissable read is Survival of The Sickest, DR. Sharon Moalem. It's really informative and entertaining, and full of surprising discovery. A very nice exposition of evolutionary knowledge.

Britain faces worse housing crash than US

Apparently Front page of the metro.


What a surprise!

Panorama - Bursting the House Price Bubble

A must to watch



Special thought to vonric :)

The others 2 parts.
PT2
PT3

Mortgage Fraud in the USA

Vi Marginal Revolution


"
BasePoint Analytics LLC, a recognized fraud analytics and consulting firm, analyzed over 3 million loans originated between 1997 and 2006 (the majority being 2005-2006 vintage), including 16,000 examples of non-performing loans that had evidence of fraudulent misrepresentation in the original applications. Their research found that as much as 70% of early payment default loans contained fraud misrepresentations on the application.
"

Less Freedom in Britain

"According the Heritage Foundation and Wall Street Journal's annual Index of Economic Freedom, Britain now ranks as a "mostly free" economy, rather than a "free" one. That's because the UK's scores have worsened in four of the ten economic freedoms measured by the index: trade freedom, monetary freedom, fiscal freedom, and freedom from government. By far the worst scores are in fiscal freedom (where we get 61.2 percent) and in freedom from government (where we score just 40.1 percent). Basically, that means our taxes and public spending have gone up, and we are less economically free as a result."
...


More here

The real reason behind the anti-obesity campaign

This morning, going to work, I realise why the government is going to spend our taxes on teaching us how to eat "healthy".

It was obvious, press against some dude's belly in this overcrowd coach. It hit me.

The slimmer the people, the more you fit in a coach ! It's a clever solution to solved London train chronic overcrowding !! Make people slimmer.

I think it's great idea, honnest ... Can the government go on diet too? because I think it's using too much of people money for their - people or government? - own good... It might have the stupid idea to pay police men to put people in prison if your not in the standard size next... "Insulting the space of others" that would be

FRENCH TRADER WAS FORCED TO WORK 30 HOURS A WEEK

FRIENDS of rogue trader Jerome Kerviel last night blamed his $7 billion losses on unbearable levels of stress brought on by a punishing 30 hour week.

Kerviel hid his November losses in a batch of wonderfully fresh croissantKerviel was known to start work as early as nine in the morning and still be at his desk at five or even five-thirty, often with just an hour and a half for lunch.

One colleague said: "He was, how you say, une workaholique. I have a family and a mistress so I would leave the office at around 2pm at the latest, if I wasn't on strike.

"But Jerome was tied to that desk. One day I came back to the office at 3pm because I had forgotten my stupid little hat, and there he was, fast asleep on the photocopier.

"At first I assumed he had been having sex with it, but then I remembered he'd been working for almost six hours."

As the losses mounted, Kerviel tried to conceal his bad trades by covering them with an intense red wine sauce, later switching to delicate pastry horns.

At one point he managed to dispose of dozens of transactions by hiding them inside vol-au-vent cases and staging a fake reception.

Last night a spokesman for Sócíété Générálé denied that Kerviel was overworked, insisting he lost the money after betting that the French were about to stop being rude, lazy, arrogant bastards.

From the Daily Mash

A reason not to vote Labour at the next Election

On ID cards :

"Did everyone in Parliament back the plans?

No. The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats are against the scheme and both say they would scrap it if they win power. The House of Lords also rejected the plans five times, before agreeing on the compromise deal allowing the opt-out from 2008. "

Via bbc

Why I'm staying in London

And not returning to Paris.

- It's more open, more tolerant and less conservative than in France.
- The club, bar are places for the people not for an elite.
- The management in companies is better and more relax.
- The state does not steal more than 50% of what I earn - even if it's still far too much -
- The cultural scene is far more dynamic - probably because it's not finance by the state, or not that much -
- The accommodation are good quality and very diversify from a house with garden to a penthouse with view over the Thames
- The disable integration, it does not exist in France.
- obviously the salary but it's mainly due to taxes difference - the bad named charge patronal -
- the common transport, really well integrated to Greater London

What I'm annoyed by
- the hygienist movement
- the local councils which use recycling as an excuse to reduce their expense, they are not responding to the need of the population just promoting at best some ideology
- Ken the red, gonna have to vote for Boris ... great
- The common transport, really expensive and relatively unreliable

It's obviously not exhaustive. But I can't see my self going back to Paris... Maybe another country, but it's quite an hassle to do that.

Disclaimer :
I obvously avoid any personnal matter, just so that the matter in question does not get offended

Who said

"Socialism has not failed, it just has not been tries" ?

Ken Livingstone... worrying ... specially when he praised Chavez after for implementing it.

On Dispatches

Massive losses on the stock market

European Stocks Fall the Most Since 2001; Asian Stocks, U.S. Futures
Slump
<http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aXz_C0OpmoXA&refer=
europe> Stocks plunged in Germany, Hong Kong and India on mounting
speculation that the global economy is slowing and company defaults will
increase.

London suffers most as house prices fall

London was hardest-hit by falling house prices in the final quarter of 2007, a new survey from the Halifax shows today, adding to the gloom in the housing market.

Britain's largest mortgage lender said Greater London led price falls in eight regions across the UK with a hefty drop of 6.3%. This was followed by the south east and east Midlands, which each saw a decrease of 2.3%.

In the Guardian

The flying castle

I remember last year I was talking with an IT contractor, who was in his spare time investing in some fancy property projects, about the property market. I was arguing that the price will go down and we were heading for a big "correction". He was making the point that it will continue to raise because of the lack of property, immigration etc... I answered by a "but rent are not sky rocketing"...He was convinced and did not want to miss the property cash lottery - apparently all the ticket were winners -.

At the time beginning of 2007, rare were those who were saying that a crash was on its way. 3 month later a acquaintance of mine, a pure bull who was advising me to invest in the property market, told me that she was now thinking properties were not a good investment anymore. The mood started to change ...

It was less than 1 year ago, now everybody agree that it's not going to raise, and few still think that it's going to at worst stagnate...

How can people come to think that a 140% increase since 200 and something was normal? How did people in NI think that 50% increase was sustainable?

Vested Interest, easy lending, fraud. All of that I guess. But now Banks can't lend easy anymore, people are repossessed, and for the lest 3 months prices are going down, even in London - how improbable, remember in December I was in the pub and somebody was saying that it could not fall in London ... -.

What can we say about the future? not much. The doom monger are already singing the end of the world, and the optimist still believe that a house crash is unlikely.

The truth is probably in the middle. I'm convince that house price will go down, my guts tell me a 80% chance of a 40 to 60% fall in real price.
I see 3 reasons for that:
- classic valuation tell us that property are overvalued between least 20% and 40% according to different financial sources. a property is an investment that give you a return the rent. The same way you can compute the price of action base on its dividend, you can compute the fundamental price of flat with its rent.
- the bubble directed a lot of money on the property market. More than what was needed creating an oversupply of flat. Shocking no ? everybody talk about shortage, but there is no shortage otherwise rent would have follow the same path.
- a lot of the east European immigrants are working on the commercial or residential property market. As the property market slowdown, and the commercial one is already crashing, there is less demand for labour, most of them will cash in and go back to their mother country. reducing the demand of flats.

So we have a raising offer and a declining demand, and largely over valued prices, that sounds like a great cocktail for a massive correction.

Will that put the capitalistic system on its knees? I don't think so, it's not the first crisis. If government don't play stupid it should be painful for some but ok.


PS: there is a lot of risk on inflation, and that's kind of scary

UPDATE:
a 50% fall cancels a 100% increase
2% fall month to month for 12 months is 21% fall year to year
1% fall month to month for 48 months is 39% fall on the 4 years
I said real price, meaning price adjusting for inflation, I price stagnate that means real price fall at the pace of inflation. At 2% a year - the target -, that's already 10 % - 9.6 to be more precise - on 5 years.

Happy New Year

One less to go!

2007 has been an exciting year.

- the credit crunch
- housing recession in the USA
- beginning of the downturn in the UK
- Amy Winehouse is still standing or almost.
- The mighty Boosh is back !
- Global Warming is responsible for my loss of hair
- Brown is heading the same way as the housing market
- Killy is back !
- End of the subprime market

But still no
- Extra-Terrestrial
- End of capitalism
- End to stupidity
- End of Marxism - believe some people still are found of this crap ...

2008 promises to be a really good one too.
What to expect :
- Housing recession in the UK
- Recession in the USA
- Amy going to rehab ?
- France non smoking ?
- a bunch of unfulfilled prediction
- A lot of people asking for more regulation and state intervention

What not to expect :
- Extra-Terrestrial
- End of capitalism
- End to stupidity
- End of Marxism - shit ...-

And Good Luck to those who buy a house in 2007...

To follow the financial/housing/real world crisis

Nouriel Roubini is maybe the only credible loud voice that was right about the downturn in the USA. All the specialist did underestimate the risk in the USA, it is likely that they are also largely underestimate in the UK, get ready for at least going back to 2001 price in real term - not this year, in the next 5 years quite likely- ...