"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Thursday, April 10, 2014

Osborne's Plans for Election Victory

Buy-to-let boom?

EXTRACT: In reality, just like the ‘help to buy’ racket, Osborne’s pension reforms are centrally about keeping the housing bubble afloat and generating that warm feel-good factor by injecting a quick stimulus into the economy. He knows full well that pensioners will use their newly ‘liberated’ pension pots to buy property as a retirement income, especially buy-to-let investments - and, admit it, you would probably do the same. It would hardly mean you were a Rachman or property magnate. Property, when all is said and done, still looks the best investment in a country like the UK, with its obscenely skewed economy. Either that or watch your precious savings dwindle away under rock-bottom interest rates. Not very smart. Significantly, the average age of buy-to-let landlords is 53, which is 20 years older than the average age of their tenants. It is now set to get older still.

Margaret Thatcher talked of a ‘property-owning democracy’, where everyone has a stake in society. Our own front door which we can paint any colour we like. Osborne’s budget is like a zombie version of that dream, given that all measures in this direction have not had the desired end result. In fact, things are going into reverse. Thatcher’s property-owning democracy is in retreat, with first-time buyers having an average age of 37 and eight out of 10 only able to buy with family help. For the first time since the post-1945 building boom, more people now rent privately than live in social housing - the latter having shrunk by more than two million through the right to buy.
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Posted by at 3:06 pm

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