The mortgage fraud at the heart of the housing boom
By Tony Bonsignore, 11 March 2009
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One of the key lies underpinning the UK house price boom was that it was really all about a fundamental shortage of housing stock in a country with a rapidly rising population.
‘We’re still only an island’, ‘look at all the foreigners we’re letting in’, ‘look at how few houses we’re building’…these were just some of the secondary arguments routinely used to support their contention that house prices would inevitably keep on climbing, probably for ever.
Of course now that average prices are falling at an annualised rate of nearly 20%, it is easy to see the poverty of these arguments.