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Guardian Reporters reading Wilson threads here??
brit1234
Posts: 5,385 Forumite
Buy to let: Why the Wilsons are not the villains
It's no good blaming the actors in the buy-to-let drama, when the director is at fault
The story of the Wilsons sums up much about what has gone wrong with Britain economically and financially in the past 10 years. Yet try as I might, and I've been vociferous in my opposition to buy-to-let for many years, I can't dislike them.Did they and their fellow property speculators ramp up house prices beyond the reach of normal folk? Yes. Did they pocket large sums of money through borrowing and leverage, rather than producing something of industrial or social value? Yes. Did they foster a culture in which houses weren't for living in but gambling on? Yes.
But though they are the figureheads of the £150bn blown by banks on buy-to-let they were simply the actors, rather than the directors, of this show.
You could cast them as the evil landlords. :beer:But they simply don't fit the bill. The Wilsons are, in reality, the clever maths teachers who could see how the sums added up.
They didn't create the six-month assured shorthold tenancy legislation that is the legal backbone of buy-to-let. They simply took advantage of it. They didn't dream up the securitisation deals that allowed the former building societies-turned-banks to pump out hundreds of billions in cheap loans that were not matched by savings or deposits. Again, they just took advantage of it.
And, judging by what they say about the behaviour of the developers, other borrowers and many of the lenders during the heady years of the boom, the Wilsons may have been at the more ethical end of it.
Poking fun at the Burberry outfits and the no-hope horses is easy.:rotfl: But, in person, the Wilsons, married for 41 years, are a surprisingly unassuming, friendly double-act who share much more in common with middle England than with the vulgar rich of Mayfair. Judith Wilson even rescues the cats abandoned by her tenants.
Fergus Wilson may throw out comments about leaving the UK because of 50% tax rates, but he doesn't mean it. He'd much rather munch on a BLT sandwich in a three-star hotel off the M20, where I interviewed him, than hang out in a boutique Monaco hotel. Tellingly, they have never hired a PR or spin merchant to massage their image or story. What you see is what you get.
But this changes my views on buy-to-let not one jot. I've heard all the guff about it being just another business model. But housing is not like making widgets, it's about people's lives. It's not, and has never been, just another product market. It has always been framed by legislation, not least the planning laws that so tightly control suburban development.
The Tories introduced short-term tenancies in the early 1990s to please their landlord friends, and met relatively little opposition. There was a sense that the balance of power between tenant and landlord had swung too far in favour of tenants. But when these new tenancy agreements were allied with easy lending terms and a relaxed tax environment, the balance swung wildly in favour of landlords, over tenants and first-time buyers.
There are some simple measures that can redress this imbalance. The first and fairest must be to create a level playing field on tax. The capital gains tax (CGT) landlords pay on residential property speculation is 18%, compared with the 31% you and I pay on servicing our mortgages from income. As a country we face years of increased taxes to counter the deficit problems created by the banks. Increasing the rate of CGT on residential property to 30%-35% would be a fair and relatively painless measure. And if it drives out speculators and decreases the total volume of lending against property, it should help to permanently deflate house price growth. And please, let's stop calling them property investors. The correct term is speculator.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2010/mar/06/buy-to-let-wilsons
It's no good blaming the actors in the buy-to-let drama, when the director is at fault
The story of the Wilsons sums up much about what has gone wrong with Britain economically and financially in the past 10 years. Yet try as I might, and I've been vociferous in my opposition to buy-to-let for many years, I can't dislike them.Did they and their fellow property speculators ramp up house prices beyond the reach of normal folk? Yes. Did they pocket large sums of money through borrowing and leverage, rather than producing something of industrial or social value? Yes. Did they foster a culture in which houses weren't for living in but gambling on? Yes.
But though they are the figureheads of the £150bn blown by banks on buy-to-let they were simply the actors, rather than the directors, of this show.
You could cast them as the evil landlords. :beer:But they simply don't fit the bill. The Wilsons are, in reality, the clever maths teachers who could see how the sums added up.
They didn't create the six-month assured shorthold tenancy legislation that is the legal backbone of buy-to-let. They simply took advantage of it. They didn't dream up the securitisation deals that allowed the former building societies-turned-banks to pump out hundreds of billions in cheap loans that were not matched by savings or deposits. Again, they just took advantage of it.
And, judging by what they say about the behaviour of the developers, other borrowers and many of the lenders during the heady years of the boom, the Wilsons may have been at the more ethical end of it.
Poking fun at the Burberry outfits and the no-hope horses is easy.:rotfl: But, in person, the Wilsons, married for 41 years, are a surprisingly unassuming, friendly double-act who share much more in common with middle England than with the vulgar rich of Mayfair. Judith Wilson even rescues the cats abandoned by her tenants.
Fergus Wilson may throw out comments about leaving the UK because of 50% tax rates, but he doesn't mean it. He'd much rather munch on a BLT sandwich in a three-star hotel off the M20, where I interviewed him, than hang out in a boutique Monaco hotel. Tellingly, they have never hired a PR or spin merchant to massage their image or story. What you see is what you get.
But this changes my views on buy-to-let not one jot. I've heard all the guff about it being just another business model. But housing is not like making widgets, it's about people's lives. It's not, and has never been, just another product market. It has always been framed by legislation, not least the planning laws that so tightly control suburban development.
The Tories introduced short-term tenancies in the early 1990s to please their landlord friends, and met relatively little opposition. There was a sense that the balance of power between tenant and landlord had swung too far in favour of tenants. But when these new tenancy agreements were allied with easy lending terms and a relaxed tax environment, the balance swung wildly in favour of landlords, over tenants and first-time buyers.
There are some simple measures that can redress this imbalance. The first and fairest must be to create a level playing field on tax. The capital gains tax (CGT) landlords pay on residential property speculation is 18%, compared with the 31% you and I pay on servicing our mortgages from income. As a country we face years of increased taxes to counter the deficit problems created by the banks. Increasing the rate of CGT on residential property to 30%-35% would be a fair and relatively painless measure. And if it drives out speculators and decreases the total volume of lending against property, it should help to permanently deflate house price growth. And please, let's stop calling them property investors. The correct term is speculator.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/blog/2010/mar/06/buy-to-let-wilsons
:exclamatiScams - Shared Equity, Shared Ownership, Newbuy, Firstbuy and Help to Buy.
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Comments
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Is it my imagination or has the Guardiam been reading the Wilson threads here and on HPC and now done an article.:rotfl::exclamatiScams - Shared Equity, Shared Ownership, Newbuy, Firstbuy and Help to Buy.
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When did you change you sig brit? Up until the middle of 2009, you had something about 50% crash by the end of 2009.
Shame that never did come off for you...
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nollag2006 wrote: »When did you change you sig brit? Up until the middle of 2009, you had something about 50% crash by the end of 2009.
Shame that never did come off for you...
Keynsian Economists in the BOE strangly decided to cut intrest rates to nothing delaying the crash.
As you can see the whole market is going under with yet another huge scalp the Wilsons. Stamp duty back up, government funding for mortgages ending so banks shortly will have to lend on their savings, that means lower prices:exclamatiScams - Shared Equity, Shared Ownership, Newbuy, Firstbuy and Help to Buy.
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!!!!!!........Not Again0
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Bizarrely I was on the same train as the Grauniad editor yesterday evening, but I did not spill the beans.Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists of choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable. J. K. Galbraith0
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1984ReturnsForReal wrote: »!!!!!!........
Surely you mean Les Tosseurs...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=GB&v=mdvfmGPDVkk0
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