I'm surprised to see this in The Daily Mail

From The Daily Mail:

During the property boom of the late 80s, the average British house price passed through the £60,000 barrier for the first time. Because that level was unsustainable – justified by neither average incomes nor rent levels – it wasn’t sustained. Prices collapsed and didn’t recover that level until the end of the 1990s.

Thereafter – insanity. In the decade from 1997, house prices trebled. They didn’t treble because British houses had suddenly trebled in size, or because people had become three times richer, or even because inflation had skyrocketed. They trebled because banks made it easy to borrow, easy to bid up the prices. That was all.

The ratio of average house prices to average earnings went from around 3.5 to more like seven times average earnings – implying that prices at their peak were overvalued by almost 100%...

That heat wasn’t justified then and it isn’t justified now. The sombre truth is that we were due a property crash in 2008-09 and got little more than a splutter and pause. The reason why prices remain high has nothing to do with the supposed uniqueness of the British property market – which isn’t, in fact, much different from any property market anywhere.

Prices are high because money is still being pumped relentlessly into the economy by the Bank of England. That money hasn’t had much impact on the jobs market: I guess you’ve noticed that. It hasn’t had much impact on business investment or wages or productivity or innovation or infrastructure or business creation or any of the other things which might actually make a long term difference to the economy. Instead, it’s affected three markets to an unhealthy degree. Those markets are the stock market, the bond market and the property market.

Via Happy Mondays at HPC.