Saturday 21 January 2017

So British

From the FT:

The value of all the homes in the UK has reached a record £6.8tn, nearly one-and-a-half times the value of all the companies on the London Stock Exchange.

A rapid rise in the value of the housing stock, which has increased by £1.5tn in the past three years, has created an unprecedented store of wealth for Londoners, over-50s and landlords, according to an analysis by Savills, the estate agency group.

As well as rising sharply in nominal terms, housing wealth has grown in relation to the size of the economy: it was equivalent to 1.6 times Britain’s gross domestic product in 2001, rising to 3.3 times in 2007 and 3.7 times in 2016.


How little things have changed since the eighteenth century. It's still so much more acceptable to have your money in land than to have it in trade (as it used to be called).

6 comments:

Steven_L said...

The value of land in Zimbabwe got very high at one stage, as long as you measured it in Zimbabwe dollars.

Mark Wadsworth said...

" it was equivalent to 1.6 times Britain’s gross domestic product in 2001, rising to 3.3 times in 2007 and 3.7 times in 2016."

Yeah! Well done Newlabour and Tories! Let's see if we can go for 5 or 10!

DBC Reed said...

Bayard is right: rather than continuing with the slow ascent of the Manufacturing and Commercial Interest (Liberal), the British social system has seen a science-fiction scale reversion to the dominance of the landed interest(Conservative) engineered by grotty Tories who have spread cheap property widely then made sure that this inflates in value keeping the new landed interest voting Tory forever. They have consolidated this stranglehold by taking over UKIP/ fascist anti immigrant prejudice. Thank you Mrs Shitknickers 2nd.

Bayard said...

DBCR, yes, the policy of selling off council houses on the cheap has worked so much better than its progenitors can ever have hoped.

benj said...

@MW

"Yeah! Well done Newlabour and Tories! Let's see if we can go for 5 or 10!"

Perhaps the best measure of dysfunction is rental values vs selling prices.

Lets say total UK land rental values are £250bn and the selling price of land is £4.5trn, gives a ratio of 1:18

Where as it ideally should be as close to 250,000,000,000:1 as possible :)

Lola said...

Sooooo depressing.