At the moment I am sitting in Houston Texas where they have just experienced something extremely unusual, a snowstorm. There were alot of very excited people yesterday taking pictures and the TV dubbed it “Blizzard 2009″ with almost blanket coverage. Today, though things have calmed down and I have been trying to make sense of what the rest of the news is all about.
Talk on the economy has really been dwarfed this week by, of all things, and as our waitress this morning so eloquently put it, by Tiger bloody Woods. Seriously, it is wall to wall coverage now the blizzard is done.
As an interesting little test in the greatest tradition of Back To The Future I wondered if you could write something with the benefit of hindsight and post it in the past?
If this is the case then perhaps that is that how some people can say “I told you so” and show the post they blogged some time ago?
Very interesting and we shall see.
By the way, I reckon Torres will score a hatrick on Saturday!
With fixed rates having risen in recent weeks and now looking a tad overpriced, especially for longer term fixes, tracker products are booming again due to headline rates with a “1” at the start.
Whilst HSBC have stolen all the headlines with their 1.99% lowest rate ever malarkey, (actually the lowest rate I remember was 0% for 6 months!), Woolwich have quietly taken up the fight and slipped in a stepped tracker product starting at 1.98% !
Apparently alot of blogs are just rehashed ideas and comments from other blogs, according to some people, (you know who you are!). So I thought rather than produce my own today I would re-print Paul Masons’ Newsnight blog on the subject of inflation which, to be fair, is rather more eloquently put than my own random musings – dependent on your point of view of course.
Therefore, word for word see below (to follow Paul Masons blog click here).
Paul Mason | 19:17 UK time, Wednesday, 12 August 2009
No-one was surprised at all when the MPC kept Bank Base rates on hold yet again, but the key question for the Bank however, was never around the Bank Rate itself, but around the future of the Quantitative Easing (QE), campaign. The surprise here, of course, was that they decided to INCREASE it’s policy of QE by a further £50 billion.
This is a major sign that the Bank is erring on the side of caution to make sure the recent encouraging signs are nurtured and shows how fragile the lending market is.
Andrew Montlake, Communications Director at Coreco and ‘Mortgage Personality of the Year 2008’, gives his views — honest and no holds barred — on the latest developments within the mortgage and property markets.
