House Price Fall Nationwide Report - Money Markets Pressure on Mortgage Funding

It appears the Nationwide reported near 1% fall in house prices, averaged accrod the UK may be perpetuated by a lack of funding in the markets

Average net mortgage lending is, or has been around £9 billion per month over the past year or so whilst retail over the counter deposits have only been growing at around £6 billion per month

Whilst this shortfall remains, mortgages will get even more difficult to obtain and will be more expensive and both items will obviously make selling a house more difficult, so pushing down prices

Some forecasts say a drop of 7% through to the end of 2008 though we suspect it might be more, even if the Bank of England did pump some money in to the system and/or reduce rates we don't see it being enough to alleviate the drop

Northern Roack Sir Richard Branson Luqman Arnold

It seems Sir Richard could lose out on Northern Rock providing him a rather large nest egg - it does make sense to allow Luqman Arnold, who really did sort out the Abbey, a chance to bid and run the bank as a going concern - there is profit there and if RAB and John Wood's SRM can, with other shareholders raise the money to appease the Bank of England and Darling Alistair's Treasury then surely it is better for all to carry on as established?

Yes of course some lending criteria needs to be tightened but Northern Rock never were an adverse lender, okay they might have income stretches, but they were always open and up front about them

TCF - FSA - Self Cert Mortgages

The FSA are reported to have censored a number of mortgage brokers and are no doubt investigating others over the mal-practice of inflating incomes so as to qualify for loans.

Some brokers have been order to cease trading whilst new systems are implemented and we suspect that some heavy fines will follow for others.

Whilst we do not condone this fraud, sometimes the self-employed or company owners can justify this, in thier own minds at least on a basis that they have the means to earn more, or infact that they don't declare all income!

Not declaring income defrausd the revenue and all tax payers and brokers that may be aware of this must understand that the law now dictates they should report this under the money launder rules - the broker could be jailed for failing to report, even.