[tomxor]

> One way to stop this is to raise interest rates and pull pounds out of circulation but the government is terrified of popping the real estate bubble.

I'm pretty sure i'm being naive here but... why?

House ownership has become a huge problem for recent generations in the UK, I still haven't engaged with the market because it's so hard to get a foot in the door unless you have masses of disposable income. Popping the bubble would help a lot of people in the UK to begin a more healthy long term financial life (i.e compared to pouring a huge chunk of your income into the pockets of landlords instead of a house you end up owning).

Is it that at a market scale there would be repercussions outweighing the obvious benefits to citizens? Or are they just protecting the rich who want to maintain the value of their "assets".

[thewarrior]

A housing crash would be destabilizing in its own right and it would hurt the rich Tories. So there’s no way they are letting it happen. They will fight it tooth and nail.

[solumunus]

It's a huge problem for poor people. Liz Truss and Kwasi's friends hold most of their wealth in property and those are the people that matter to these soulless lizards.

[truckerbill]

All the housing stock will be snapped up by Blackstone and the like...

[UglyToad]

Not so much "the rich" as the vast majority of voters and a large section of the population. From "Rethinking the economics of land and housing":

> One important effect has been on the interests and aspirations of the electorate: the last thirty years have witnessed an expansion in the number of voters who have a vested interest in the buoyancy of the housing market, and a marked decline in the constituency of voters with an interest in social housing

> This has triggered a shift in political attitudes on issues of housing and resulted in a much greater focus on meeting homeowners’ aspirations. Overall these factors represent a profound shift in the way that land and property has been perceived in British society.

> Whereas 100 years ago houses were mostly regarded as simply somewhere to live, today homeownership is promoted as an investment opportunity which offers long-term financial security in the face of stagnating wages, dwindling pensions and reduced state welfare provision. To politicians and much of the general public alike, houses are no longer perceived as universal consumption goods but rather as vehicles for accumulating wealth.

> Homeownership has become perceived by many as ‘the essential step to obtain membership of an expanding middle class for whom housing equity was pivotal in a broader lifestyle of credit based and housing equity fuelled consumption’ (Forrest et al., 1999). [...] underpinning this has been a deregulation and liberalisation of the financial sector and a rapid increase in income and wealth inequalities.

> This marks the final major shift in land’s economic significance, as high levels of owner-occupation, a deregulated housing finance system and growing inequalities have combined to create a system of ‘residential capitalism’ (Schwartz and Seabrooke, 2008). In turn, the political dominance of homeowners – both in national elections and in local planning decisions – has ensured that their interests have been protected and subsidised by government policy (Keohane and Broughton, 2013).

For the avoidance of doubt, I don't think this is a desirable or sustainable situation. I just thought it was helpful to expand on the contributing factors.

[rcarr]

This sums it up nicely. The entire UK economy is a stack of cards with home ownership at the very bottom. If property prices plummet, the whole thing goes down.

Not to mention that a large portion of MPs are also landlords so doing anything about it would not only harm the economy as a whole but would directly hurt their own income streams.

I would say that the internet has actually played a pivotal role in bringing about the situation we’re in now. Before, the rich could keep the information to themselves and rule the game. Now, the information is out there on the net for everyone to find. Now more and more people are trying to join the landlord game which leaves a smaller and smaller group of workers to actually keep the country running.

All of this was made even worse by the fact that Brexit ended up stopping the flow of people at the bottom of the pyramid keeping the whole thing up. The only way out of this situation is for companies to reduce the amount of money they pay out at the top and increase the amount they pay to the bottom, it’s the only way to avoid a housing crash. But companies will never do this voluntarily, they’ll have to be forced by a drastic legal minimum wage hike.

This likely won’t happen until Labour get in power. The problem is that this minimum wage hike, may bide some time, but will also lead to bankrupting many small to medium size businesses.

There really is no solution other than to let the house market crash as it should have done a long time ago, and to rebuild the economy based on actual productive work rather than the essentially fake money being generated through rising property prices which are outpacing wages. The problem is that if this were to happen, we are talking Great Depression scale levels of homelessness. I would say the effects may even be worse because a lot of people have become accustomed to a comfortable, modern existence and aren’t going to know how to survive if it’s taken away in the same way that people in the 1920s might have done. The one thing that might help is that technology has come such a long way with things like insulation and clothing that may lessen the worst of it.

No political party wants to be remembered as the one who caused the Depression because they will be so unpopular they may actually cease to exist. Some Tory MPs have been quoted as saying this is “an extinction level event” for the party. Some polls are showing that if an election were held tomorrow the tories would go from having 350 odd seats today, to somewhere between 3 and 70. And that’s just at the threat of mortgage rates going up to 6%, it hasn’t even happened yet.

If the conservatives went below fifty seats, the SNP would become the official opposition. For the last 100 years, the two main parties have been Labour and The Conservatives. The Tory party have been around in some form since 1834, if this were to happen (and it’s looking increasingly likely) it would be truly monumental in British politics.