Another day, another desperate throw of the dice (46, approximately)

From the BBC:

A new scheme to prompt banks and other lenders to make more money available to homeowners and businesses has come into operation.

Under the Funding for Lending initiative, the Bank of England will lend money at below-market rates to the financial institutions. The Bank will then monitor their progress in lending the cash out.

If they want businesses to have more money, they could just cut taxes on business a bit, and we also know that there never was much lending to businesses anyway, so why, I wonder, do homeowners need to borrow so much money?

But the lower borrowing costs being introduced by mortgage lenders are so far only being offered to people with large deposits.

Aaron Strutt, at mortgage brokers Trinity Financial, said: "Most deals attractive to first-time buyers, such as those at 90% or 95% loan-to-value, have not changed yet."

The introduction of the new lending scheme comes as the Nationwide building society said house prices had fallen last month for the fourth time in five months. The decline of 0.7% in July means prices are now 2.6% lower than they were a year ago, at an average of £164,389.

Oh I see.

They don't want to make more money available to homeowners or even homebuyers, all that cheap money is going to end up in the hands of homesellers. They are desperately trying to keep house prices up, which clearly is only for the benefit of people who own a house but don't need it, which is hardly a big chunk of the electorate, so mainly this is for the benefit of the usual suspects, the large landowners and banks, who will of course be paying "below-market rates" for all this lovely money the taxpayer is being forced to lend them merely so that some of them can borrow it back at, presumably, "market rates".