CVs - again.

So any company that receives outside investment from rights issues or
in return for equity has been "bailed out"?

I don't think either Barclays or HSBC were in real danger of failing
had they not done that.

 

Any company that suddenly has to raise several billion or else go tits
has, yes. The only difference between HSBC/Barclays and the others is who
they got it from.

They seemed to think so.

 

So why is nobody doing it?

Rental income may have nose-dived, but the kind of housing being built
for rent is of little or no use to most families and there are a lot
of empty flats.

Exactly: people had a choice between rents they couldn't pay and a
lower mortgage, but they are called stupid or greedy for taking the
mortgage on offer.

 

Yes, but they could no longer borrow it from the international money
markets, so had to borrow it from the government instead.

Sure it's paper money, but it still has to have some real money behind
it somewhere in the chain, otherwise...

 

(M J Carley) gurgled happily, sounding much like they
were saying:

Because nobody wants to capitalise on their loss.

What's "being built" got to do with the price of fish?

 

If the politicians stood by their (socialist, in this case)
"principles", then no bribe would take place.

We all know MPs only get into politics for the good of the public[1],
and not to feather their own nests, so I can't see how bribery on the
scale you allege could possibly happen.

You must be imagining it.

[1] V&M says so, ergo it must be true.

 

Which doesn't tally with the link that Adrian posted:

"HSBC, along with Barclays, opted not to seek cash from the government."

 

"aspects of the scheme"

 

No it doesn't. Banks lend (much) more money than they have. The UK
cash ratio is 0.15%.

 

Tony Blair made a point of saying he wasn't a socialist.

 

Yes, and HSBC, Nationwide and Standard Chartered were also signed up
and yet:

"HSBC, Nationwide and Standard Chartered also welcomed the plan but
said they did not intend to take on any new capital at the moment."

So I think I'm just disagreeing on TBC's use of "bailout" from his
earlier post, so I'll leave it at that.

 

If you're just talking about new builds, then yeah, maybe. But that's
not the 'buy-to-let' crowd, that's the big developers. I think of the
BTL crowd more as the ones who buy disgusting old uninhabitable
shitters, spend a fortune doing them up, then rent them out. They're
invariably suitable family homes, & I can't see a downside to doing
that.

The blame for a lack of housing overall lies fairly & squarely at the
doors of the planning departments & the ever more stringent buildings
regs. They've massively pushed up the cost of building a house. The way
things are going, the cost of the insulation alone for a new house will
be more than the total build cost was 20 years ago.

 

Not just that.

A couple of years ago, we looked at a new build just outside Bracknell.
And then we drove half an hour down the M4 to Thatcham, and saw exactly
the same house for £100k cheaper.

Now I am sure that the land in Bracknell probably cost a bit more, but
to the tune of £100k a plot? Market forces must count for a fair chunk.

I mean Bracknell is a shit-hole so I'm not sure why it commands such
high prices. The only reason is the rail link into London (but that's
nowhere near as good as Reading or Slough) or the fact that it's
"overspill" from people that really wanted to live in Ascot or Windsor.

 

'Cos our pensions are going to be shit?

 

Maybe they didn't NEED to, but wanted to?

Except, of course, you seem to miss the rather fundamental flaw in your
argument - if nobody's renting, buy-to-let becomes unviable.

Because prices have been increasing rapidly for years, and the "stupid
proles" didn't see that that was unsustainable.

 

Probably not that at all.

So it's not planning departments pushing up prices, it's property
developers pushing up prices because they can get away with it.

 

(M J Carley) gurgled happily, sounding much like they
were saying:

Supply, meet Demand.
Demand, meet Supply.

 

Yes, because they have (or had) the facility to cover as much of that
as they were ever likely to need by borrowing from the international
markets. Make that need a reality at the same time as taking away the
borrowing facility & the shit hits the fan.

 

If being allowed to build lots more houses for less money wouldn't lead
to more & cheaper houses, there must be a big chunk of economics that's
passed me by.

 

Even if that is true, the money being lent to them is being lent by
banks which don't have `real' money to back the loan.

The borrowing facility wasn't `taken away': the banks stopped lending
because they knew they were all living in the same fantasy world.