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How about Thatcher and Reagan who started this whole stinking mess.

BeestonBoy, you say you are fairly young, well I am fairly old (well 58).

Let me tell you how it used to be in say the 1960s and then 1970s when I started to buy a house.

In those days banks were banks (current accounts, cheque books etc) and building societies lent you money for mortgages (that is all). In fact I think in those days banks could NOT lend you money for a mortgage.

Nobody had credit cards and you could only spend what you had in the bank (unless you got something on Hire Purchase).

You could SAVE money with Building Societies, and they used their savings pot to give out mortgages.

Most building societies would ONLY give you a mortgage if you had saved with them for a couple of years (to prove you were sensible) AND only on something like twice a mans salary and half a woman's salary.

I remember going to get my first mortgage at a building society my wife and I had saved at for 2 years. We had about ?500 saved I think (early 70s) and the MOST they would offer us was about ?7,000. We had to borrow money off relatives to buy our first house.

You could not just go anywhere to get a loan or mortgage like today, and the fact that it was difficult to get a mortgage helped keep house prices down.

Then of course credit cards came in, and all of sudden you could buy anything you wanted without waiting for it, even if you could never pay off the debt.

Gradually of course Banks started to want to give mortgages, and building societies wanted to be banks (Abbey at one time was just a mortgage company) and next thing you know anyone and everyone is trying to offer you money.

Of course banks make money from loans and credit card debts, so it was in their internest to get everyone in as much debt as they could. And if their lending drove up house prices, who cares, it just means people have bigger mortgages and pay more in payments each month.

So as I said in my last append, if anything is to blame it is unregulated capitalism.

One day of course the bubble will burst and China and India will have all the money and the UK will be full of millions of people in debt with a failed economy.

stripeysydney wrote:

> How about Thatcher and Reagan who started this whole stinking
> mess.


It's true that both de-regulated their own banking systems in such a way as to make it easy for almost anyone to offer credit.

If you'd told anyone in the mid 1970s that by the end of the century they could get insurance, loans and other financial services from Tesco, they'd have had you locked up in the nearest mental facility. However, thanks to Thatcher's care in the community initiative, it seems those who should be locked up for their and everyone else's safety are now running the major economic institutions!