Secret strategy of high house prices forced high savings

[rockyracoon]

Or its a bubble!!!!!!

It's wearyingly predictable, all of this. The muppets that got us into this mess (i.e. the population) are now running around like headless chickens looking for scapegoats. Eventually the mob will pick something - the US, the banks, some conspiracy or other, anything - and pin the blame on it, rather than taking a good hard look at themselves and the society we have built here over the last 15 years.

Nobody forced half the country to get into stupid debt in the stupid hope of getting stupidly rich in a stupid amount of time.

Cheap available credit won't do any damage at all if the populace are responsible enough to be trusted with it. Instead the Irish cut loose like a bunch of spoiled brats locked in a sweetshop.

Irish society, I blame you.

It's particularly nauseating when a champion of Privateer Bandit Capitalism like patslatt starts putting on the beal bocht and looking for scapegoats to deflect attention from the fact that a properly-regulated banking sector would never have been allowed to fire out 100% 40-year IO mortgages in the first place. Privateer scumbags and their "deregulation" fanaticism is one of the root enablers of this entire mess.

I do think you've hit the proverbial nail on the head. There is an awful lot of cash in certain households, though, so we just might see another small run on housing.

[Sidewinder]

Talk to the people in the industry. It's deferred demand. The arse hasn't fallen out of the industry.

"Deferred demand" me hole. Yer delusional.

And as for your ahem critique of neo-liberalism.

One word=Chile.

Cased closed.

As I said, a delusional and dangerous nutter. 11,000 dead, a fascist regime, real wages collapsed, endemic poverty. But the Privateers made out like bandits on the blood and sweat of the overwhelming majority of the Chilean people. And this to you is a success.

You people should be locked up before you incinerate the planet.

[Pax]

And as for your ahem critique of neo-liberalism.

One word=Chile.

Cased closed.

Yeah, Pinochet and Opus Dei's Chile. I'm not surprised you're a fan of that appalling authoritarian neoliberal dictatorship. But what saved Chile was not neoliberal economics. In fact that practically destroyed the economy.

Tinker Bell, Pinochet and The Fairy Tale Miracle of Chile

Chile could boast some economic success. But that was the work of Salvador Allende - who saved his nation, miraculously, a decade after his death.

[...]

To save the nation’s pension system, Pinochet nationalized banks and industry on a scale unimagined by Socialist Allende. The General expropriated at will, offering little or no compensation. While most of these businesses were eventually re-privatized, the state retained ownership of one industry: copper.

[Auditor #9]

I have a conspiracy theory that Dublin city's planners were secretly encouraged by the government's economic strategists to limit high rise and high density housing developments.

This was done to emulate a key element of Japan's postwar industrial strategy. The Japanese government made it very difficult to acquire farmland for development,deliberately driving housing prices sky high. The goal was to create a huge pool of capital available for business investment by forcing Japanese consumers to save a very high percentage of their incomes for downpayments on houses.

Is their a better explanation for needlessly crazy Dublin housing prices?

I've harboured this theory too

How many high-rises have been rejected in the past 12 years in Dublin? And who rejected them and on what grounds? Do we blame nimbyism for it or engineering or was there a concerted effort to keep Dublin low-rise? Is there precedent for this in any other city in the world?

That pyramidal shaped building on the Quays across from the IFSC and behind the Ulster Bank on Townsend Street is a hideous monster of a thing while a compact trio of towers designed by Skidmore Ownings Merrill was originally proposed for that spot, the highest being 14 stories but it was rejected with some organised political groups down there protesting against it at the time. Looking at the heap that's there now, I wonder why it was rejected - it was higher density than the current rubbish and would have been located in the city centre, comprising office, commercial and living space thereby obviating a certain amount of commuting.

That was in 1998/9 and how many such buildings have since been rejected around Dublin city centre? Sean Dunne's was the most recent in Ballsbridge. Would the three towers of Skidmore Ownings Merrill at Moss Street/Townsend Street have started a trend that would have seen the suburbs grow less than they have?

All the while, the buildings around the IFSC complex could have been built twice as high if not higher thus using that density to take the heat out of a market which looked purposely over heated when you ask the reason why the 100% mortgage was let loose in the country.

[powderfinger]

PS, people who have lived of credit and have ignored the free money SSIAs deserve everthing they get. Sensable people save and "co-incidently" end up wealthy.

You can be sure that the banks didn't ignore the 14 billion euro swelling of their Reserve Ratio's courtesy of SSIA inflows.Now thats free money.

[needle_too]

www.property-bee.com

Firefox plugin for Daft.ie

Come and get it!