Brickonomics

It is good to see that the chill wind hasn’t frozen the work produced by the economists at the consultancy CEBR. Here is one piece of cogitation that caught my eye. CEBR’s chief economist Douglas McWilliams has done a “quick back of the envelope calculation” that suggests an additional two to three thousand businesses may fail in Q1 2009 as a result of the bad weather. CEBR had looked at the impact of the cold weather in 1962/63 and found…

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New Year, new figures from Nationwide showing a new fall in house prices. No surprise there then. But the next few months may prove critical to the final shape of our current house price crash. Will we see a more gentle continuation in the slide in prices or should we brace ourselves for a possible new shocking drop in the value of homes? Is the recent slowdown, as noted by Nationwide, in the rate of house price falls just the…

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The appalling GDP figures released today suggest construction has got off relatively lightly so far – odd don’t you think? The economy took its biggest nosedive since mid 1980 in the final quarter of last year, a drop of 1.5%. But surprisingly construction was less impacted than most sectors and the economy in general. I say surprisingly, because I genuinely am surprised by the data.

Remember the pleasure and pain of Euro ’96, the rise and rise of the Spice Girls, This Life and Chris Evan’s TFI Friday on TV, John Major as Prime Minister and Swampy digging in against the road builders? Well some of it came flooding back to me when I realised that the latest forecast from Hewes & Associates foresees construction output falling over the next three years to levels last seen in 1996. That would be a drop of about…

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Mortgage lending last year was down about 30% on the 2007 figures and in the final quarter was running at well below half the peak level, according to the latest figures from Council of Mortgage Lenders. CML expects the level of lending to drop further in coming months, which may well translate into a further fall in the level of transactions. The December figure for mortgage lending was particularly bad at £12,600 million placing it as the lowest month for…

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Record redundancies may be the headline in today’s news bulletins and tomorrow’s papers as the ranks of the unemployed creep towards 2 million. But in the detail of today’s labour market figures of more concern to the thousands of redundant construction workers now looking for new jobs is that vacancies are plunging fast. The latest data don’t update us on the state of redundancies beyond what we knew last November when they hit a 10-year high (see blog). The figures…

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The latest figures show that home sales in 2008 were down 43% compared with 2007, but scarier than that is the drop in level of property transaction over the second half of last year. This poses a real threat to even “technically” viable housing schemes.

We are heading into the worst peacetime economic slump since the 1930s, according to the latest forecast by the highly regarded ITEM Club. This marks a massive collapse in hope for the UK economy. Just three months ago the ITEM Club’s autumn 2008 forecast carried the sub headline “…the recession in the wider economy should not be severe”. The latest forecast paints a very different picture. It suggests that unemployment will rise to 3.25 million and house prices will fall…

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