[Diggers350] housing and land monopoly

[MarkiB]

Stuart said:
"I would predict (famous last words) that the impact of the public sector
cuts, a potential new recession, peak oil, rising food and energy prices
etc will mean an end to business-as-usual boom-and-bust and just bust. So
the idea that the housing market will simply revive is a dangerous one.
debate?"

>  I'll bite. I would agree that there will be an end to business-as-usual
boom-and-bust and just bust. In the medium term (so maybe in the next year)
my antennae is tuned to financial experts who are predicting that there is
going to be a financial crash of unprecendented proportions.

According to Rick Ackerman (his website - Rick's Picks), in the US - the
largest economy in the world by virtue of it's collossal overdraft
(combined national, private and commercial debt is over $50 trillion) -
Quantitative Easing will start to feed directly into inflating a real
estate bubble (while some might ask "did they learn nothing from 2008?",
the fact remains that it will be mainly due to the fact that the
post-industrialised market economy of the western world has no other larger
store of wealth). Commentator Max Kaiser has previously described the QA
mechanism in the context of what he cites as an inevitable future financial
collapse as akin to the controlled demolition of Building-7.* The worry is
that some of this debt (over $50 trillion - which on paper appears
manageable as compared to total assets of $131 trillion) may still be
leveraged several times over as it was with sub-prime and other financial
innovatives. The whole totality is a web of deceit and financial contricks.

Ackerman and others now predict based on market trend analysis of stock
trends that, because the bond markets have been on a near-constant uplift
since the early 1980s, and while the post-2008 crash environment has seen
the economy largely supported by the life-support machine of QA, mainly for
the benefit of the banks to recover asset values on their balance sheets,
to extend the metaphor, when the life-support machine gets switched off, a
slight pinprick in any stock bubble now will result in an implosion of that
bubble - what Ackerman in conversation with Max Kaiser on 'On the Edge'
(Press TV) describes as "the implosion of a multi-leveredged dollar-based
bubble that aggregates to close to quadrillion dollars". It is a figure
based upon the value of the US Treasury debt, combined with the value of
the dollar oversea foreign exchanges plus the the value of the derivatives
market - estimated to be £6-700 billion (it is estimated worldwide to be
£6-700 trillion). The result will be that asset values across the board
will be destroyed.

Ackerman says though asset prices will combust, prices for essential
commodities like food will hyper-inflate. Ackerman points to the
hyperinflation in the Weimer Republic in Germany where at the end of 1921,
people who bought land with 100% mortgages found they paid off their
mortgage after the first harvest.


* (Building 7 was the building in New York near the twin towers not hit by
an aircraft which fell on it's own footprint at freefall speed on 11th
September 2001, approx 6hrs after the twin towers fell, in which was
located the office of the Security & Exchanges Commission, in which there
were all the paper file records into the investigations into large-scale
fraud at Enron and World Comm - now incinerated into dust). 

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: RE: [Diggers350] housing and land monopoly
Date: Tue, 19 Oct 2010 21:47:42 +0100
From: Stuart Hodkinson <s.n.hodkinson at leeds.ac.uk>
To: james armstrong <james36armstrong at hotmail.com>, diggers
<diggers350 at yahoogroups.com>

James

Halving the social housing fund is not, in itself, going to kickstart a
property boom.

While we might think that a lack of 'social housing' and housing in
general will create the scarcity problems that cause price rises - and this
is the case for London - general house price inflation is going to need the
return of easy credit which isn't on the cards - without access to
mortgages, there will be far less house sales and there will be far less
liquidity in the system to push up house prices. 

Social Housing Grant was mainly awarded to Housing Associations to
match-fund private borrowing.

I would now expect the big housing associations (RSLs) to simply gobble up
all the small and medium size RSLs and borrow against their assets / future
rental streams to build.

So, it is wrong to assume that there will be no social housing built - you
must also remember that local authorities will also be - apparently -
allowed to borrow against their rental streams to build council housing in
the near future through the reform of housing finance that Labour started
before it lost power.

What IS CLEARLY HAPPENING is a rise in private rental values as first time
buyers fail to buy and low social housing supply pushes people into the
private rental sector.

The housing benefit reforms will dampen this, but the impact on people
will be horrendous.

There is also the question of local housing markets in which the boom
never ended, or the bust never ended.

I would predict (famous last words) that the impact of the public sector
cuts, a potential new recession, peak oil, rising food and energy prices
etc will mean an end to business-as-usual boom-and-bust and just bust. So
the idea that the housing market will simply revive is a dangerous one.

debate?

stu
________________________________________
From: Diggers350 at yahoogroups.com [Diggers350 at yahoogroups.com] On Behalf Of
james armstrong [james36armstrong at hotmail.com]
Sent: 19 October 2010 21:30
To: diggers
Subject: [Diggers350] housing and land monopoly

David Cameron announced to-day  he is  halving the  Social Housing Fund.
Saving money is the excuse, the real  plan is to restart the  mad rise of
house prices.

This is a continuation of the Gordon Brown, Bank of England 
macro-economic policy
-the only kid on the block- Which caused and burst the inevitable housing
bubble.

The continuing strategy is to substitute a growing UK financial  sector
for the post War collapsed UK trade and industrial sectors.

To get economic growth in UK  the method selected  is to boost  consumer
spending financed by a credit boom.  Inflated house prices are the 
‘assets’ which act as collateral for the credit . This is  the sub prime
mortgage scandal resurrected.

We are back to the beginning of  boom and bust again.

Specifically   the policy is , create a shortage of houses (everyone needs
one) . -by  decreasing supply of new houses (the Big Builders are
co-operating here)  and turning out- ejecting - council house tenants. By
doing this  you swell the  demand for buying houses.
If the supply is static or falling (down to a record low supply of 160,000
new houses in 2009) The price inevitably increases.

You could think of it as another form of Quantitative Easing -  inventing
money- this time by artificially inflating the value of houses.

You can’t beat the system by building your own -  there’s monopoly control
of the land for building  on , operated (see Barker p 81) by the plc
housebuilders . Farmers are the only other group who can build- since they
own land- many houses are built on agricultural land.
At Poundbury, the Duchy of Cornwall has built  or (currently is not
building) some 2,500  permissioned houses on Poundbury Farm and Middle
farm. The Duchy’s  Fordington Farm was built-over many years ago- but the 
farmhouse still stands forlorn amidst another 500 houses. .

 Farmers  account for a surprising number of self build ) facilitated
because they already  own land and have agricultural privileged permission.
 The corall gate is closed by the planning laws which restrict building
outside the areas already designated and where the  big plc builders have
snapped up all the sites long ago to hold in landbanks and boast about in
their balance sheets.

The planning regime was specifically introduced to regulate the expected
boom in housebuilding after WW11 and the Council House building boom.  When
building numbers drop off, and council houses are no longer funded and plc
housebuilders have long ago learned to snap up all the designated land, 
the effects of the planning regime go into reverse . Planning laws now
support the monopoly instead of regulating the  boom.


Farmers are also rewarded big time and secretly with C.A.P. payments
annually. The Duchy gets a cheque from C.A.P. for £417,000 and rising each
year. They exploit the land monopoly in this way too.

Publicising and ending the The Land monopoly and its malign effects on
housing and farming and politics is  the key to beating the system.
Exploiting the people through monopolizing land  is the common theme of
history ,so should not be surprising.  Property qualification for voting
was the rule until 1875.  Bulk property owning was the qualification for
membership of the oldest House of Parliament- the Lords – until 2000 and
for membership of both Houses and for voting till well into the eighteenth
century.
The land monopoly and rigging the housing market is a breach of human
rights.
We should  support a test case contesting a repossession on these grounds.
James






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