UK property prices: Three quarters of homes sold for less than their asking price in January February 26, 2015 Here's another sign the UK's property market is losing some of its pizzazz. A new study has found three quarters of homes sold for less than their asking price in January. That's 17 percentage points more than during the same period last year. The January housing market report, by the National Association of Estate Agents [...]
It’s your chance to own a museum-quality work at The Masterpiece London fair June 25, 2015 Anyone who has seen Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David in the flesh will know that standing in front of a masterpiece is a transformative experience. There’s something incredibly humbling about viewing an object that represents a life’s work. The Masterpiece London fair is probably the only place on earth where you can [...]
Donald Trump’s fairy tale economics is bad for his party and terrible for America July 27, 2015 The Republican Party must be tearing its hair out. For years, visitors from the US have extolled the strength of the party’s potential Presidential candidates for 2016. The pack is certainly more impressive than in 2012 and, with the exception of one or two candidates, they are ostensibly advocates of relatively free market policies. In [...]
Conservative manifesto: Extending right-to-buy will transform the prospects of low income families April 14, 2015 The centrepiece of the Conservative Party manifesto, unveiled yesterday, was a significant expansion of the right-to-buy scheme. Giving families the ability to own their own home is a wonderful thing, and extending the scheme to housing associations, as the Conservatives propose, will certainly do that. The broad economic benefits of home ownership are well established, [...]
UK house prices: We can ramp up housebuilding by turning offices into flats – if the planners let us April 1, 2015 The UK suffers from an acute housing shortage, and this has led to prices outpacing incomes in nearly every year since the early 1990s. Most government initiatives to address this problem, however, have merely resulted in greater demand for properties. In fact, the only way to tackle the issue properly is to increase supply. But [...]
ECB, Bank of England reach agreement over clearing houses March 29, 2015 The European Central Bank and the Bank of England have hammered out a deal over the City's clearing houses, ending a lengthy dispute over whether euro denominated transactions should be cleared outside the Eurozone. It comes after Britain clinched a rare victory against the ECB in the European Union's second highest court. Because most clearing [...]
UK house prices accelerate as drop in London moderates March 11, 2015 The fall in London house prices is moderating, an influential study of property surveyors showed today. The proportion of surveyors reporting falling prices in the capital outweighed those reporting a rise by a margin of 28 per cent in February, the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) said. By contrast, the net balance seeing prices fall [...]
Sadiq Khan: Can a Labour mayor make City Hall pro-business? Labour mayoral candidate on what separates him from Jeremy Corbyn September 23, 2015 Sitting in a cafe around the corner from the Labour party’s headquarters in Westminster, Sadiq Khan says that he and the new Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, are not always in agreement. “Ken Livingstone as the Labour mayor often disagreed with the Labour leadership, Boris Johnson as the Conservative mayor often disagreed with the Conservative [...]
Sixty years on: Why the battle for a free society is still yet to be won June 17, 2015 Sixty years ago, Sir Antony Fisher founded the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA), realising an idea given to him by the economist Friedrich Hayek seven years earlier. The IEA is one of the oldest think tanks, and one of the most successful, something even its opponents freely concede. But what does success mean in this [...]
Would it be legitimate for the second largest party post-election to form a government? May 6, 2015 Andrew Hawkins, chairman of ComRes, says Yes The second largest party did indeed win the February 1974 Election (a poll with ominous similarities to 2015), when Harold Wilson won four more seats than Edward Heath but received 230,000 fewer votes. Yet it was not thought a constitutional outrage. Even if a party does come second [...]