Coming down from the QE high will be painful especially if inflation starts to accelerate. Hold on…

Technical question for you… As QE is inflationary, will it have to come to a stop when inflation kicks in, to avoid hyper-inflation, even whilst keeping interest rates low to prevent a debt reckoning? ie: a period of inflation will force the BoE’s hand into halting QE?

I won a rubbish plastic trophy at work last year ‘The World’s Greatest Planker’ for a 5 min effort…

44 this year and still wearing Converse.
The Boomers and older are acting like tiny toddlers so what’s wrong with middle-aged men dressing like teenagers?

RegressiontochildhoodrulesUK :-)

Waterloo Bridge is tricky at night – the view east is amazing* but you need to keep looking where you’re going

*although since 2008 it’s less awe-inspiring than it used to be… tinged with a hint of anger

Ref people wanting high salaries – you need to simply look at two things
1. Debt – especially for new graduates. They’ve been forced into a massive debt. They’ve no way of paying it off without earning a decent amount – hence they ask for a decent amount. A bit harsh to blame them for this situation. Remember if they don’t earn above the threshold amount c£21k then the bill falls to the taxpayer (thereby taking away taxes from NHS, schools, road etc).
They also have to save silly money to be able to buy a home at some point in the future. Again, they didn’t create this situation, it was forced on them.

I appreciate they may come across as expecting too much but it was government and older generations that have forced these massive basic costs on them and they’ve no way of clearing their student or mortgage debts without big salaries. Or should we expect them to live their whole lives in debt?

2. Cost of housing – force up the cost of an essential to the levels we’re now at and no-one’s got anything left to spend on day to day stuff – hence higher salaries are needed to be able to get shelter, pay for food, bills etc. let alone save for pension/rainy day.
I’d like to retrain to something else but having already left London to reduce my rent down to £900 month I simply can’t afford to take any kind of pay cut in order to move career and start again from the bottom. So I’m trapped – by the cost of housing.

We’ve put our economy in a really weak place through trying to fund everything through debt, refusing to train our workforce properly and pushing up the most basic costs of living up through the stratosphere. We’re now beginning to find out just how stupid we’ve been…

I’m still hoping Theresa’s deliberately turning this into the hardest of hard exits in the hope it meets so much resistance from the general public at large when we all start to realise how much we’ll lose that she feels forced to call another referendum or a general election…

I’m increasingly concerned however that my hope is misplaced.

Although I did disappoint my Very Loyal Tory mother the other week when I told her that a combination of her party forcing me to leave London by making living there unaffordable and Brexit mean that they’ve lost my vote for a good length of time. Reading the FT comments I may not be the only ex-Tory voter around…

This is the most likely outcome, no problem with paying tax.

Good man. You’re the first person in a number of years who’s responded with any level of understanding to my argument that unaffordable housing is a crisis for all of us which needs sorting and that hoarding of a scarce essential resource in a time of crisis is a pretty unpleasant thing to do to other people..

OP – sounds like he’s pretty well sorted financially so best thing is to release the house back onto the market and let someone else have it who needs a secure home to live in… the housing crisis is very real and very painful for those on the wrong side of it.

He may have to pay tax but surely that’s fair enough given that it’ll be on capital gains only, so he’ll simply be giving a proportion of a load of unearned wealth back to government to spend on health, roads, schools etc when the country badly needs it…

Worth looking at either a stock market investment focussed on income rather than growth or just a simple fixed term bond for lower risk…

Anyone who thinks BTL is worth it simply isn’t paying attention… the law changes in April…

Tax property – massively.
Avoid taxing earned income, it disincentivises labour and wealth creation from actual work.
Maybe tax consumption – that way the wealthier will tend to pay more
Tax property – there are literally millions of people who’re hundreds of thousands of pounds richer than they were three years ago, let alone ten or twenty years ago and ALL of it was unearned so they won’t mind giving some of it back to pay for schools, hospitals etc*
Most of this ‘wealth’ has been created by forcing younger generations into crippling amounts of debt so taxing it is likely reduce the incentive for homeowners to do everything they can to inflate house prices which will free up post-tax income for broader economy. WIN WIN.

Land Value Tax is well discussed in the FT and Economist but so far, no sign of a response from the government sadly

* they probably will but that’s more a sign of our new national character rather than any sense of care for anyone else…

+1 for some support for those struggling to find anything…

I’m at a loss to understand how the stockmarket and various sets of data on employment and economic growth keep suggesting a positive, strong economy as on the jobs front it feels like anything but. A few anecdotes from me
1. Had to move out of London last year to find work – 20 years experience in marketing, spent 6 months unemployed after my last contract came to an end – couldn’t even get an interview – a couple I did got cancelled or put on hold indefinitely. My new employer is going through a big review as well, likely to lead to job cuts…
2. Brazilian friend of mine, very well qualified, multi-lingual, lots of experience, took 18 months to get a job
3. One of my best mates, very senior, impeccable CV, 20+ years experience, 10+ years in the City – ended up moving out to Abu Dhabi just over a year ago – he couldn’t get work either.

These kind of high value, knowledge-worker senior roles in London are supposed to be where the growth is, but on the ground it doesn’t appear that growth is turning into jobs. And all these anecdotes are from before the Referendum vote and Brexit…

I guess Brexit is a better measure of sentiment about economic opportunities than the official metrics.

I’m always being accused of being too negative but reading papers like the FT and Economist and there’s serious concern that the underlying economic situation is incredibly precarious – without super low interest rates and QE we’d be in serious trouble.

I tend to have a pint of water with an electrolyte tab as soon as I get home then a further pint across the next hour.

I assume you’re also eating when you get home? I make a homemade chocolate milkshake within 20 mins of getting home – just 300ml of semi-skimmed and a couple of dessert spoons of Cadbury’s Chocolate Powder – to get my fill of protein and sugar as immediate post-recovery.

I’ll then do an hour of stretches and then eat – scrambled eggs or something similar. Maybe a bowl of cereal if I’m still hungry. That seems to sort me out.

If I think I’m going to still be hungry at work the next day – if it was a particularly tough ride for e.g. then I’ll make a bag of nuts and raisins to keep hunger at bay.

Hyde Park has a few CycleSuperHighways you can pootle around.
Regents Park is nice and flat. Primrose Hill less so. Obvs.
City is ace at weekends – hardly anyone lives there so it’s empty and very relaxing – you get time to look about you and appreciate the history and architecture.
Go and have brunch at Look Mum No Hands on Old St
Backstreets of Chelsea and Kensington are interesting.
Avoid the West End if you want quiet roads

I’ve also been using the liquid soap stuff. Fabric comes out a lot softer and more flexible. I put woollens in there too.

CynicAl – what did Gore have to say about soap flakes then?

From the FT story about Trump’s reasons to repeal the legislation put in to stop the banks crashing the world again. I’m not sure his supporters were voting for this 8O

We expect to be cutting a lot out of Dodd-Frank because frankly I have so many people, friends of mine, that have nice businesses and they can’t borrow money

Is he trying to get himself impeached so he can go and set up Trump TV?

From the readers’ comments in the FT. Sadly funny…

Our brexit /which art uneven/ hallowed be its blame/ our serfdom near / our will be clear/ as a wrexit heaven/give us this day our daily gruel/ and forgive us our nationalism/as we condemn all foreigners among us/ and lead us not unto Brussels/ but deliver us unto the Donald/ for he has the story/ the power and the Tory/ for ever and ever/ We Won! Get over it!… the wrexiters’ prayer — latest update complete with new added muddled thinking ( only the one glass of wine…promise ).

Be saga for me, I live in Worthing and I’ve got a 2yr old and a 5yr old. I’m pushing my weekend away riding limit for the year already…

No worries, I’d assumed you lived in London… great thread though, thanks

I could have got you round on the sly a few years ago, it would be too much of saga now, it’s on a high level of lockdown.

Sorry, I didn’t mean that cheeky :D I was thinking more of a ride from central London along the river to it, and then seeing what we could see from the riverbank – with you as a tour guide… but obviously only if you’d be happy to and you think we’d see enough to be interesting…

OP – bit of a cheeky ask but I sense enough curiosity on this thread for an STW-guided tour of the barrier. I’d certainly be interested – the risk of London being flooded fascinates me – the risk to the UK economy overall being so high that I’m assuming a huge amount of attention’s being paid to ensure it doesn’t happen…

Would you be happy to do that one weekend? I’m happy to sort out a meeting place somewhere appropriate and we can ride up from central London to the barrier for you to show us how it all works.
If anyone knows of a suitable quiet route that would be helpful. I could try and sort out something using Google Maps but an existing known route would be less of a fuss…

Flood London and you will probably find the supermarkets cant take your card for payment. The cashpoint machine in your town wont work. The “Cloud” where the internet now lives will stop, its not actually in a cloud.

Actually no, cos these things are planned for

Agreed – Visa’s data centres for e.g. are out of town even though Head Office is in central London. I imagine that all critical infrastructure is sited and defended or at least risk-managed for such events, or being planned to be moved or defended according to climate change forecasts

What happens in the scenario where the barrier has to be shut to keep a tidal surge out of London at the same time as unusually high levels of water come downstream from Windsor direction?

I remember Egham and Staines flooding a couple of years ago which IIRC they’ve not done for 25 years. Also Cleopatra’s Needle on Embankment having waves lapping at its base last year – first time I remember that happening in 15 years. I believe the water table is still very high so it may not take a massive storm to cause a repeat.

When you come across Battersea Bridge on the train and look at all the new flats going up on Battersea Power Station it doesn’t half look like the ground floor flats would be underwater if the tide ever overcame the top of the shoring on the south bank. But developers would never build thousands of luxury flats on land at risk of a flood, would they… 8O

Have as your priority your desire to give someone a happy and pleasant home to come to every night, as opposed to thinking about how much money you can get away with charging them.

Housing is the most divisive issue in the UK at the moment with the ‘haves’ quite openly extorting as much as they can from those that don’t… to the detriment of everyone as we run out of money to spend after housing ourselves…

I’m looking for a room for weekends in London at the moment and one potential was quite open that she was after as much money as thought she could get away with. No way she’s having any of my hard-earned…

Do you really own your home? Not if you’re a leaseholder

A good summary of the rip-offs going on with new build/leasehold

Financial times

If the link doesn’t work – cut and paste the first line of my post into your browser

Land Registry numbers tell us that thousands of houses are now being sold on long leaseholds as well.

If you are one of the buyers of one of those houses, perhaps one who spent years saving enough a deposit to move out of the rental market, I wonder if you are what you think you are. You see, you aren’t actually a homeowner. You are still a tenant. You have the right to occupy the property for 99 years, 125 years or perhaps even 999 years. But the building itself and — crucially — the land on which it sits, remain the property of the freeholder.

But think about the ground rent and you will a clue as to why developers are so keen on leaseholds — and why some have even been selling perfectly ordinary three-bed newbuild houses (rather than flats) on absurd 999 year leaseholds instead of freeholds (although salesmen like to call them “virtual freeholds”). As buying agent Henry Pryor points out, there is “no genuine reason” for this.

Quick, easy, and good coffee when camping.

Find a good coffee shop. Pitch your tent outside. Easy.

Does it count as theft if he brought it back? :-)

Been meaning to do it for a few years but things got in the way until last year. It was ace. Really ace – nothing quite like charging down dark country lanes in a massive group all through the night and then suddenly it’s Sunday morning… and you’re sitting on a beach watching the sun rise.
We accidentally did and out and back when our return transport arrangements didn’t work out so we did 202 miles in 21 hours. Deep sense of achievement :-)
From now on any year’s riding which fails to include the Dynamo will not feel like a proper year…

This really cheered me up… possibly the most appropriate spelling mistake ever :-)

Although I doubt very much it was a genuine mistake…

Probably worth listening to this – Radio 4. I caught the last third of it…

How Marx Made The Right

Makes the point that Neoliberalism started to fall apart once Communism failed as we had nothing to positively compare it to – hence even though it’s had many benefits, a significant proportion of the Western electorate no longer support it.

It also makes the point that a homeowning democracy was supposed to be one of the key benefits of neoliberalism to make sure the masses got a share of the wealth – and in that respect neoliberalism has certainly failed in the UK at least… Mind you, it’d be interesting to sit down with those that know and trace back the sources of money that seemed to pour into London from 2012 onwards and see how much came from Russia – making housing unaffordable in the UK is a great way to get us to reject our governing class…

whilst i have been catching upon the whole thing this weekend it dawned on me,may has she double bluffed everyone , she came out swinging with her hard brexit and did a very good job of making people think she was in it to win it but on tuesday at 9.30 the beaks will be announcing wether it needs to go for a vote

will she actually trigger it or will she turn round and go oh well then beaten by the vote its all off , forget it you knew i was pitching for a hard exit….im really really gutted honestly

I think she’s playing a bluff, yes. The more extreme her position, the more likely people will rise up and protest – and the more people there will be doing it… If enough people are feeling poorer by the time the deal gets finalised and the deal is lousy enough I think a significant % of people who voted out will find they’ve changed their minds.

Worth looking at this story from BBC. To a degree I’m sure they’re cherry-picking her quotes but less than a year ago she understood all the downsides to leaving and was speaking out against them. I believe that she’s no history of total reversal of her views within 8 months…

BBC story comparing Theresa May’s quotes from April 2016 to now

There’s some real heartlessness on this thread – if you’ve nothing constructive to say to the OP then maybe stay out of the conversation? it’s minus 2 and the middle of winter FFS! The landlord’s created this situation and is in breach of the tenancy agreement in any case…

OP – you have my sympathy. This is why, in part, renting is being forcibly professionalised and the amateurs driven out… landlordism and this housing crisis generally is bringing out the very worst in the ‘great’ British public. This in particular:

Don’t withhold a landlord his livelihood because you’re being petty.

My boiler broke a couple of weeks ago when I was away and I’m glad to say the agent and landlord were a damn sight better than yours. One thing the agent did do was bring around a couple of those electric heaters which, along with me spending the weekend in my thermals, got me through ok – it was in the minuses then as well…

My advice – do NOT withold rent, it puts you in breach of contract.
I would either get a hotel for the weekend and keep the receipts and make a claim back for it or buy some heaters and, if you need it, thermals and claim back for them. If you look at your tenancy agreement it will have a clause in there that your landlord has to make provision if the place is uninhabitable which in these temperatures I would think you’ve a very reasonable case…

Call Shelter on Monday and get some advice on your legal rights and best course of action… You may want to stay away from this thread if you want some useful advice and support

Have you cleaned both inside and out?
Is there something in the reservoir polluting the windscreen wash?

“In a time of deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” — George Orwell

It’s always been like this. Autocrats have always used propaganda to influence an ignorant public to suit their own agenda. Hitler knew it, Chairman Mao knew it, Stalin knew it, Erdogan knows it… And people who lead their lives full of fear have always been prey to propaganda and political dogma – the Daily Mail’s and UK tabloids have known this for the entirety of their existence. History has always been written by the victor.

My parents both had pretty traumatic childhoods and are very frightened people as a result, and they’ve always been very challenged by anything which contradicted their rather narrow worldview – but they’re no worse now than they were in the 80’s really… except with Brexit they’ve been able to impose their fear on all of us rather than just their own family…

On a positive note, I have hope. Social media and the internet and the worldwideweb were all developed on a philosophy of collaboration and of sharing the power, rather than concentrating it. I think the reason everything feels so tough now is that
a) autocrats realise they can’t control what the people hear and discuss amongst themselves – which terrifies them (interesting that my parents refuse point blank to use the internet) and
b) we, the people, have had the wool pulled from our eyes. It’s not that the truth is being manipulated any more than it used to be, more that we’ve become horribly aware how manipulated our news channnels are – which has come as a bit of a shock.

The question we need to ask ourselves is which way will it go now…. there’s a risk that the autocrats will subvert the internet enough that we’ll lose faith in it, and then they’ve won. Certainly with current politics it looks like the autocrats are winnning, hence this thread. Liberals tend not to fight as hard as Extremists as by definition we’re more emotionally healthy and try and find peace rather than conflict…

Personally I think STW is great – I’ve learnt all sorts from it over the years. One being to avoid Picolax, two being avoid putting Sudocrem on the cat and three, the utter infallibility of the Dunning Kruger effect :-)

Well Theresa May appears to have changed her tune since April last year…

April 2016 to now…

I’m still hoping she’s a remainer and she’s secretly putting in the most extreme scenario she can plausibly get away with, which will most likely satisfy as few people as possible in order to generate as much protest as possible, leading to the electorate demanding another vote… it would come at the cost of her political career so it’s a hopeful hope I agree… but the alternative scenario is she’s gone utterly bonkers…

We’re having a nervous breakdown now we realise we’re neither rich nor powerful… USA is doing the same. I can’t imagine it’s going to be pretty.

Well I’m now thoroughly depressed…

I have the possible option to join one of my best friends in Abu Dhabi. I’m very tempted… if I lose my job in the UK because of a downturn then that’ll be my main hunting ground for a new job.

I’m still holding out that May’s real game is to let us suffer an economic downturn for a few years and allow us to end up with a deal which is so lousy and generally leaves us all worse off (especially pensioners and lower paid who voted out) that public opinion turns and demands another vote on the actual deal and leave loses badly… this is still possible – in fact pushing for a hard exit makes it more likely not less and it’s essential for this plan to work for us all to believe that she genuinely wants us to leave… which we currently do.

In the meantime, the people who’ll keep things moving in the UK will be the hard-working, industrious and entrepreneurial ie. the remain constituency. Idiots like my parents will carry on living off their taxpayer dollar and not have to lift a finger to contribute to sorting out the mess…

My Godsons, aged 11 and 8, know what tea-bagging is… although tbf that’s not my fault, I blame the parents! They believe it comes from some wrestling/martial arts thing however…

Agents fees to landlords likely to be going up later this year as Chancellor is seeking to make fees to tenants illegal.
Rise in BTL has increased supply this year – putting downward pressure on rents
house prices go up with supply of credit, rents go up with wages. Wages are currently stagnant and when inflation kicks in this year, likely to be falling in real terms. It’s a myth that you can just charge whatever rent you like and increase it when you like to ‘cover your costs’
Depending where in the UK the place is, rents are already taking up 40%+ of take-home pay i.e. severely detrimental effects on tenants financial wellbeing so expect tenants to be increasingly bolshie about being expecting to pay so much to rent – it’s crippling a lot of people
Institutional investors are building to let. This will increase supply of places to rent which will also put downward pressure on rents as supply increases.
BTL/renting is not the easy money game people think it is, and with more and more discouragement from government it’s going to get harder, not easier to make it work.

I’ve heard a lot about Gatorskins being unreliable in the wet so I’m running mine at 90 psi + riding very carefully. They’re 28s too so hopefully I’ll stay upright.

I did look at the Continental Gatorhardshell too – they don’t seem to have the same reputation for poor wet performance but they appear to have the same rubber as Gatorskins – the only difference is an additional layer of puncture resistance.

Anyone got experience of both? Are Hardshells grippier than Gatorskins?

Reading, but makes litle odds, house prices sit somewhere between ‘how much!’ and mental. The gulf between what you’d like and what’s affordable is just daft.

Reading is expensive now because once Crossrail’s open, journey times will be less than from SE London’s outer reaches…

London’s interesting at the moment – buyers have evaporated from Prime London with prices now falling and transactions across the whole city are c50% of what they were a year ago – it appears that London is running out of people willing or able to take on the debt required to live there.

Meantime, we all get deeper into short term debt for day to day living because we’ve already taken on more debt than we can afford to pay for housing. We’ve been suckered into breaking our own economy…

I was being a little tongue in cheek but was having a similar conversation whlilst on a ride last week. Mates son wants a house with hs girlfriend. Shes just got a job, rather than think about deposits, shes just gone out and bought a brand new car without thinking of the consequences to the potential money they can borrow.

To be fair, just copying her parents’ generation and all the rest of us, hence the fact we’re in record amounts of debt…

The Millenials have been utterly screwed – insecure, low paid jobs, massive student debts, unaffordable housing, being expected to use their taxes to pay off the debts of their parents generation as well as their pensions and old-age care but with absolutely no hope of the same benefits or even the same security of work or housing… I’m really surprised they haven’t been rioting constantly for the last few years.

I can’t blame them for trying to live a little – all the sacrifice they need to make to save for a deposit at today’s prices means they’ll miss out on all the things that make your youth fun…

Older generations only criticise the youth for not saving for a deposit as if the youth decide not to play the game of getting on the housing ‘ladder’ then the whole scheme will collapse and those older generations will find their unearned ‘wealth’ disappear like a puff of smoke. I’m not proud of what the UK has done to it’s youth and the legacy we’ve left them with and I wish them luck in setting a better example to us than we have to them.

I’d still be very wary of anything with a managing agent… it’s still open to abuse and ever-increasing costs. And how ‘planned’ is the adoption by the council – a salesperson’s invention to get you to buy or a firm commitment by the council…
Are older houses on adopted estates really not an option?