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’.
The Spectator
Fannie, Freddie and Gordon
The Spectator on what Gordon Brown should learn from the upheavals in the American mortgage market
issue 13 September 2008
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