johnvillan

Reflection on a Crisis – DLD09 Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan) & Daniel Kahneman

Worst house prices fall for 18 years Jonathan Prynn, Evening Standard 28.08.08 Related Articles * Taxpayer's Rock bill may rise as repossessions soar * We need a mortgage rescue plan for families, says Cable * Property gloom forces Mayfair agent to sell up after 17 years The property market faces a full-scale collapse with house prices tumbling by more than 10 per cent a year for the first time since 1990. The average price has fallen by 10.5 per cent over the past 12 months, wiping about £30,000 off the value of a typical London home, according to the Nationwide building society. The last time that house price falls were measured in double digits was in the autumn of 1990 during the depths of the last recession, when it took six years for values to recover. The figures confirm there is still no sign of an easing of the credit crunch almost a year on from the collapse of Northern Rock. A leading City forecaster is now predicting a full-blown recession for the British economy next year. Capital Economics said GDP will fall by 0.2 per cent, which would be the first full-year drop in national income since 1991. Officially, the Government is still predicting growth of at least 2.25 per cent next year. Another bleak set of financial results from leading companies this morning added to the growing mood of gloom as the City continued its return to work after the summer break. Property agents and consultants Savills said its profits fell more than 40 per cent to £19.2million in the first half of the year and warned that there was "no sign of improvement" in the financial markets. Chief executive Jeremy Helsby said he expects property prices to fall 25 per cent between January this year and December next year. But he added: "The good news is that in 2012, in London and the South-East, prices will recover to the levels they were in 2007." Car dealer Pendragon said its firsthalf profits dropped 60 per cent from £33.5million to £13.4million and the number of cars it sold to private buyers fell eight per cent in the second quarter. Chief executive Trevor Finn also said there had been "unexpected and significant" falls in second-hand car prices over the summer because of the lack of buyers and warned there would be no recovery until the end of next year. Nationwide's figures showed that house prices fell by almost two per cent in August alone, the 10th consecutive monthly fall. The building society's chief economist Fionnuala Earley said: "Recent activity levels in the housing market remain very subdued. House builders in particular have been reporting significant reductions in site visits and reservations of new properties since this time last year, in spite of a big increase in the use of sales incentives." With estate agents around the country reporting very few enquiries from prospective buyers over the summer there is little hope that there will be a September bounce this year. Nicholas Leeming, a director at online agents propertyfinder.com, said: "August was exceptionally quiet and July was also very quiet. There is likely to be an early shut down of the market for Christmas, so November will be dead as well as December. In any down period the quiet times come early." The stream of bad economic news has made a mockery of predictions that the credit crunch, which flared up in the US last summer, would end this year. In April Goldman Sachs chairman and chief executive Lloyd Blankfein said that people "feel like they're seeing the light at the end of the tunnel. We're closer to the end than we are at the beginning." It is bad news for Chancellor Alistair Darling and for Gordon Brown's hopes of capitalising on the Olympic feelgood factor to revive his poll ratings. The last time the housing market was in such a dire state the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was ousted in a party coup and replaced by a younger rival. link

Huntley also granted television interviews to the press, and his unusual interest, together with his emotional involvement, made investigators suspicious, leading to a wider search which revealed the half-burned remains of Holly & Jessica’s shirts, in a storage building at Soham College where Huntley was employed. link This is how they were found out.

General Krulak: Sorry about '£30m on one player' comment Aug 8 2008 Charles Krulak GENERAL Charles Krulak has apologised to Randy Lerner and Martin O’Neill for revealing on his internet messageboard the club would be prepared to lavish £30million on one player. The non-executive director has been forced into an embarassing climbdown after giving supporters false hope of a money spree. Again writing on a fans’ site Krulak said: “Simply put, I broke my own rule –I don’t talk about transfers. “My comments, no matter how well-intentioned, are open to the public and certainly open for mis-interpretation. “In this case, I was not helpful to Martin or to Randy. I have apologised to both. ‘‘I think everyone associated with the club understood my comment to mean that Randy and Martin are on the same sheet of music and that their is tremendous faith and trust in our manager.’’ link The mail don't give up do they.

Taken from talklfc.com. QUOTE (9fowler9 @ Jun 19 2008, 06:57 AM) Was speaking to Steffan Moore, he stil has a few links at Villa, is always chilling with their players. He said the move is on hold, looking doubtfull. Liverpool don't really want to loose Xabi Alonso, the problem is thats the only way to fund the Barry deal. Barrys wants to go to Liverpool but both him and Liverpool think he is over priced. Also Liverpool don't think they are getting a fair value for Alonso (and Xabi himself, and his family is happy at Liverpool). All this means the deal has taken a lot of backwards steps in the last few days. QUOTE (QZKOP @ Jun 19 2008, 12:47 PM) * I hope this is true. Barry is overpriced (because he is English) and I really don't want to lose Xabi. I hope Xabi stays and makes this season his statement season to remind us of how good he is. QUOTE (Hughesy @ Jun 19 2008, 01:22 PM) * Also Xabi was told of this possible transfer to Juve while playing golf and broke down into tears, he is a great player and we should keep hold of him at all costs and i for one will be absolutly gutted if he leaves and is replaced with (censored)ing gareth barry QUOTE (*Troubleshooter* @ Jun 19 2008, 01:26 PM) * who told you that? QUOTE (Hughesy @ Jun 19 2008 Yesterday, 09:41 PM) * A lad i play golf with every blue moon is a member of one of the courses up in Southport with Xabi often plays apparently and all of the members wer chatting about this incident. This lad has no reason to lie as he is not a big football fan so take it as you will but i beleive it as every1 knows how much Xabi loves liverpool link

Crash: The housing crisis is just beginning Iain Macwhirter Published 05 June 2008 As Britain wakes up to the nightmare of negative equity, we are facing a housing recession far worse than that of the early 1990s. Iain Macwhirter has a warning: don't buy a house now, at any price. Just say no. You have been warned Kingston Quay in Glasgow is one of the smart dockside developments that were supposed to help regenerate Britain's older industrial cities. The blocks don't look bad, with generous balconies and double-height penthouses. But the truth is that you can hardly give these flats away. A two-bedroom flat, bought for £215,000 in September 2005, recently sold at auction for £79,000; another went for £86,000. Nine others did not sell at all. "Live the dream," said the promotion for these developments; wake up to the nightmare of negative equity. This story is being replicated in every city in the country as the housing crash gathers momentum. In areas of Manchester and Leeds, and even parts of London, thousands of new-build flats are being offloaded at auction for 30 per cent less than they cost to buy, according to the auctioneers Allsop. The paradox of Britain's slump is that it isn't being led by a sub-prime underclass in run-down areas - although repossessions are rising fast everywhere - but by the "luxury" end of the market. The biggest falls are for the dinky flats bought by urban professionals as "starter homes", or by well-off parents, such as the Blairs, for their children and as pensions. If you have had the misfortune to invest in any of these, look away now, because what follows could seriously damage your wealth. Let's get the numbers out of the way first. There is no longer a scintilla of doubt that there is a major, national housing correction under way. Nationwide registered a record 2.5 per cent fall in May alone. Analysts such as Morgan Stanley think there could be a 25 per cent decline in two years. The International Monetary Fund estimates that British house prices are overvalued by 30 per cent. A crash is defined as a 20 per cent fall over two years, so fasten your seat belts. The Financial Services Authority (FSA) says a million people face losing their homes over the next 18 months. Northern Rock was the first banking casualty; the buy-to-let flat specialist Bradford & Bingley is the second; others will follow as this second mortgage-related financial shock shreds banking balance sheets and undermines confidence in the financial system. Even the government accepts that prices will fall by between 5 and 10 per cent this year alone, as the housing minister Caroline Flint's see-through cabinet briefing papers revealed recently (although, curiously, she didn't see fit to tell the country the news herself). Indeed, the government is still actively encouraging first-time buyers into a market that it knows is collapsing. Ministers should be doing precisely the reverse: warning young families not to take on mortgages for flats that will assuredly land them in negative equity. But the government still believes that, as the property porn queen Kirstie Allsopp puts it, "house prices always go up". In other words, it believes in fairies, and that money grows on trees. Now comes the big bad wolf to the door, and the last thing anyone should think of doing right now is buying a house. At any price. Just say no. You have been warned. Tens of thousands of relatively high-income homeowners in south-east England have placed their futures in jeopardy by taking on unsustainable jumbo mortgages. You need only look at estate agents' windows to see that the sums don't add up - London prices average £320,000 and are out of all proportion to ability to pay. Gross median full-time earnings in London last year were only £587 a week, according to government statistics. Many young families took out self-certification "liar loans" at five or six times their income as the only way to get on to the housing ladder. Now the banks are forcing them to remortgage at a higher rate and demanding large deposits. Real fear is stalking the capital's nappy valleys. This is going to be far, far worse than the housing recession of 1990-92. Fuelled by irresponsible bank lending, UK house prices nearly tripled in the decade to 2007 - a more lunatic rise even than in America. British prices have been running at nearly eight times average earnings against a historic average of 3.5. This was never going to be sustainable. But right at the moment the bubble burst, in August 2007, a combination of related events conspired to turn this boom into an epic bust that is likely to consume the British economy and lead to a depression. You may think the credit crisis is over, but the real crisis is just beginning. First, the banks found that because of the US sub-prime mess they couldn't borrow cheap money on the international markets any more, so they cut back on lending and increased rates. Banks such as Northern Rock, which had been offering "suicide loans" of up to 120 per cent loan-to-value, stopped lending altogether. Not surprisingly, people stopped buying. The number of first-time buyers in March was the lowest ever recorded, fewer than 18,000 in the whole of the UK. Apoplexy in No 10 Even before the housing slump, buy-to-let investors were losing money because of low rents; now many are being forced to sell, as the banks require them to remortgage at rates of up to 9 per cent. Overall, mortgage lending this year is expected to fall by nearly half, to £60bn, an unprecedented contraction of the market. Estate agents across the land are shutting shop - not that many tears will be shed at their plight. Nor at the loss of the hard-sell property club Inside Track, which promised to make you a millionaire overnight and has now gone bust, leaving many of its clients with huge losses. The FSA and the police are now investigating 70 separate valuation scams across Britain whereby surveyors fraudulently overestimated the value of thousands of new-build homes. In cities such as Manchester, organised criminals had recycled drug money into property to such good effect that some of them gave up the narcotics trade and turned to property speculation. Now they are regretting it. What can the government do? Well, Gordon Brown thought he could revive the market by in effect handing £50bn of public money to the banks through the Special Liquidity Scheme and by leaning on the Bank of England to cut interest rates. Not so. The banks took the £50bn in Treasury swaps in April and promptly put mortgage rates up even further. Then in May, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England, announced that there were likely to be no more cuts in interest rates this year because of rising inflation. This caused apoplexy in No 10. Brown wanted King to emulate Ben Bernanke of the US Federal Reserve, who slashed rates from more than 5.25 to just 2 per cent in eight months. But King stood his ground, and is right to do so. As anyone who goes to the shops knows only too well, the cost of living is rising faster than at any time in the past two decades. Cutting interest rates now could start 1970s-style hyperinflation. There has been much debate about the causes of the recent global inflation in commodities, but in the end, in the circular world of economics, it all comes back to housing. It was the attempt by the Federal Reserve to revive the US housing market that ignited the current commodities boom. It hoped that slashing interest rates below inflation would encourage people to put their money back into houses. It didn't. Instead, the big investment houses, the pension funds and thousands of in dividuals ploughed their cash into oil, food - anything that looked as if it might become scarce. Roughly 60 per cent of the recent increase in the cost of oil is down to speculation. In the US, cutting interest rates has actually made house prices fall faster. The increase in gas and food costs has made consumers tighten their belts and avoid mortgages like the plague. US residential property prices fell 14.4 per cent in the first quarter of 2008 - the fastest drop ever recorded by the benchmark Standard & Poor's/Case-Shiller index. Ten million face negative equity. To top it all, the inflation explosion has forced the Fed to admit that the next movement in US rates will probably be up, though not before the presidential election. Talk about a rock and a hard place. Increasing interest rates in a downturn is what turns recession into depression. How long will the slump last? Certain demographic factors may prolong the housing depression. The baby-boom generation has now reached retirement age and many couples are relying on their homes as pensions and legacies. If they want to keep their wealth intact, they will have to sell soon. This could lead to an unprecedented number of larger houses coming on the market just at the moment when younger families can't borrow the money to buy them. Pyramid of credit The recent house-price boom in Britain has also been fuelled by immigration, much of it from Poland. With the British economy weakening and the pound falling in value, however, many eastern European migrants are returning home. There is still a shortage of houses in Britain, but we are about to find that the shortage is not as great as we thought. Are falling house prices a bad thing? All things being equal, a return to sanity in the housing market is good for everyone, even estate agents. But we are facing a serious economic dis location here, not just a correction. It was brought about by the astonishing short-sightedness of central bankers and politicians in Britain and the US who kept interest rates artificially low for more than a decade. A huge inverted pyramid of credit was built on top of the expectation of yields from British and US mortgages. Believing that house prices would rise for ever, and that even if they faltered the Bank of England would cut interest rates to reinflate the bubble, the banks began to lose any sense of financial risk, and started to relax credit standards and lend irresponsibly. Private-equity firms were allowed to borrow huge multiples of their real assets. Banks started to hide their lending in off-balance-sheet devices such as structured investment vehicles. As house prices fall, this all turns into reverse. Loans de-leverage, derivatives degrade, margin calls are missed. The total value of British residential property is about £3trn. Nearly £1trn of this will now disappear over the next few years if prices fall by 30 per cent. This will have a profoundly deflationary effect, leading to falling high-street sales, business closures, personal bankruptcies and rising unemployment. Mortgage bonds will default, causing further bank crises. Britain depends heavily on the financial services for jobs and 40,000 are about to go in the City alone, according to J P Morgan. In Britain, homeowners are seeing the value of their properties fall at about £2,000 a month at the same time as the cost of living is rising and their wages and salaries are stagnant. Deluded by house prices, British consumers borrowed and spent like there was no tomorrow. Unfortunately, tomorrow has arrived and consumers are sitting on £1.4trn of debt, the highest for any country in the world. People can no longer defer their loans by remortgaging their properties, and the banks are demanding cash upfront. In the past two months, many consumers have taken out huge one-off credit-card loans, which explains the paradox of recent unsecured lending going up as spending goes down. Shelter has reported that at least a million people are putting mortgage payments on their credit cards - the height of economic madness. The government is already overdrawn and unable to spend its way out of impending recession. Treasury finances will shrivel after a fall in stamp duty and tax receipts from the collapsing financial services sector. The nationalised Northern Rock has signalled that it won't be able to repay the £26bn it was lent by the government if house prices continue to fall. No wonder Gordon Brown is looking gloomy. He once joked that there are two kinds of chancellors: failures and those who get out in time. He is no longer chancellor, but as First Lord of the Treasury, the Prime Minister is still in the firing line. The great housing bust of 2008, and the recession that follows it, will be Brown's lasting monument. And poor old prudence never got a look-in. Iain Macwhirter is an award-winning political columnist for the Glasgow Herald Housing by numbers * 250,000 UK households in negative equity * 50% fall in net mortgage lending expected this year (down from £108bn to £55bn) * 12m mortgages outstanding in 2007 * 25% predicted average house-price drop during current crash * 3,775 mortgage products available now * 15,599 mortgage products available in July 2007 new statesman

Sod Sneijder, we shall not sell our youth. Villa are no longer a selling club. Save Barry Bannan.

Just spotted this on wikipedia in Sneijder profile On the 8th of June, sports journalist, Nick Minty, spotted Sneijder in a Hilton hotel, with Tottenham chairman Daniel Levy. It is thought that Spurs are trying to thrash out a deal as quickly as possible to thwart of interest from Aston Villa and Valencia. Who is nick minty? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wesley_Sneijder

Even before the spuds were spending large amounts of cash they still had unnatural amounts of media coverage, even though they had achieved very little . Its London media obsessed with London clubs.Something i hope that Lerner/O'Neill will be shoving back down their throats.

Bruno Alves has the touch of Dion Dublin,sign him up. He was best known for viciously delivering a headbutt into Nuno Gomes's face in the 2005-2006 FC Porto-Benfica for which he received a red card. Known to be a violent player Bruno Alves became a more calm and concentrated player which surely helped him to show his true value to the team. Strong, tall, and almost invincible in the air, Alves gained a place to Ricardo Costa and João Paulo in FC Porto starting eleven this season and it seems very difficult for anyone to take it from him.

No quotes from the sun. http://tinyurl.com/3xp3ys

If we have the cash Sevilla right back Daniel Alves. Sevilla were accused of being 'outrageous' in their demands by Barcelona, so they would sell for the right price.

I thought he was great in Hi-Di-Hi Hello campers, we need to sign him immediately!

He picks up more cards than McCann. :shock: http://tinyurl.com/ysxgpm

[url=http://home.skysports.com/player.aspx?plid=29311&clid=35&cpid=10Paul McShane DOB 6 Jan 1986.

Ousmane Dabo should take him to court and get him prosecuted for assault.Maybe a few months in jail will cool him off.

For those fans that think Barton is an option,do you still want him? http://tinyurl.com/26f3q8

[url=http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/football/teams/l/lincoln_city/6618613.stmLincoln have had to send keeper Robert Olejnik back to Villa. Seems strange not to leave him till the end of the season. Lincoln recall keeper from Gulls Simon Rayner Rayner has also previously served Bournemouth and Barry Town Lincoln have recalled goalkeeper Simon Rayner from his loan with Torquay. The Imps have brought Rayner, 23, back so that he can be included in their squad for their final game of the season against Chester. Lincoln have had to send keeper Robert Olejnik, 20, back to Aston Villa so require Rayner as cover for their last match and potential play-off games. Rayner told the Gulls' website: "I have enjoyed every minute of my time on loan with Torquay." http://tinyurl.com/32tt6n

£50,000 [url=http://home.skysports.com/list.aspx?hlid=176713&plid=12086&clid=88&cpid=12Boaz Myhill deal Hull may make a few bob.

General, Now that birmingham are promoted, are we going to be ripped off yet again with £40 tickets to watch Villa at st andrews.If i remember correctly the Villa fixtures were charged at under £30 per ticket.The blues tried the same stunt with west bromwich albion, they refused to take any tickets and blues backed down and gave them normal prices.This exploitation has made my blood boil in the past,can something be done about it for the future. Thanks.

Bring back the rattle. With one of them near your ear, you can really live the football experience.

Deportivo La Coruna have been linked with Aston Villa Football Club’s Juan Pablo Angel. Its only fans fc so probably rubbish. http://tinyurl.com/2fprgj

Tobias Mikaelsson ,the lanky peter crouch/Tore Andre Flo combo ,was not very good on the night, but like half of our reserve team he could be improved.

Laursen looked the bollocks he was pushing himself about and looked secure(but just not quite ready yet!) dammmmmm!!! Luke Moore looked very poor will not be starting against Newcastle! j,loyld was playing right back and went off very easy, not bad injury! Berger played very well , he left pitch & it went down hill! Same with Osbourne he looked very strong. When him and berger went off ,it was no match after that! Special mention Albrighton decent on the right and weirdly Herd was very good at full back as he is right midfield (that lad has a nack)?!!! Steiber was great up front but was shit in the centre of midfield(second half) apart from the mullet he looks like he could do business! O'Halloran' mistake was rough! Does need to work on passing!