Nobody move or the tenants get it!

Emailed in by MBK from The New Statesman:

The expectation at the Bank is that a Leave vote would trigger a sharp decline in the value of sterling…

GBP might indeed fall, good for exporters, not so good for importers.

… and a period of heightened inflation.

If GBP falls, there is no reason to assume there will be high inflation. There wasn't after precipitous GBP falls after White Wednesday and during 2008.

In that case, the expectation is that the Bank would have to increase the basic rate of interest, which has been held at 0.5 per cent for seven years.

Why would it "have to"? Central banks should not be trying to control exchange rates, FFS, and if you want a fair exchange rate, the best thing to do is have similar interest rates to other major countries, i.e. very low at present.

Further, if a doomsday economic crash scenario, the BoE would be advised to reduce interest rates, not increase them.

That would trigger an immediate crisis in Britain’s housing market – several banks estimate that about one-third of buy-to-let landlords would be unable to pay their mortgages in the event of a 2 per cent rate rise.

We don't have a "housing crisis", we have a "transfer of wealth crisis", we've done that topic.

The rest is more wild assumptions. We know from 2008 how banks will respond. They will certainly not be increasing interest rates and repossessing landlords, thereby pushing down house prices. Banks want house price to stay up more than anybody else, it seems, even if it means making losses on the interest margin.

According to officials at the Bank of England, the true figure may well be higher, as many buy-to-let landlords have mortgages with multiple banks.

WTF difference does that make?

Renters would face a toxic cocktail of rent rises, banks that were unwilling to lend even as house prices dropped…

Again, no reason to assume rents would rise, rents are dictated by tenants' disposable incomes and not the landlord's costs. Seeing as we going with doomsday economic crash scenario, tenants' income down = rents down, not up.

Banks would be no more or less willing to lend than they are now, that is another wild assumption.

… and homeowners stuck with mortgages greater than the equity in their homes, unwilling and unable to sell up – even if buyers could be found.

Apart form being more wild assumptions (and wrong - see above), that's a tautology. What he means is "negative equity", anybody with a mortgage of more than half the value of his home has a mortgage greater than his equity, by definition. Twat.

The most sickening bit is that the NS is supposed to be left wing, is it heck, this article is just as pro-bank and pro-landlord as The Daily Mail.