Fannie, Freddie and Gordon

Last week, at a cost of a billion pounds or so, the Chancellor announced a package of measures to boost the housing market, including a temporary raising of the stamp duty threshold and some tinkering with shared equity schemes and social housing budgets. In response, the pound — already depressed by Alistair Darling’s observation that Britain now faces arguably the worst combination of economic circumstances in 60 years — fell a little further. Lord Lamont, the last chancellor to resort to a stamp-duty holiday in the face of a house-price collapse in December 1991, pointed out that the device did no good at all for the housing market or his own reputation. A spokesman for the mortgage- lending sector said he expected the impact of Darling’s package to be ‘minimal’; a spokesman for the estate agency profession, currently suffering an extreme decline, said that in London and the South-east the measures would not make ‘a hap’orth of difference’.