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Tag: Blue Book

Value of UK homes rose £125.7 billion in 2009

Value of UK homes rose £125.7 billion in 2009

Here is a figure I love to highlight – just for the craic. It seems to get people all hot under the collar for some reason. The Blue Book of national accounts shows the official estimate of the value of homes in the UK. The latest edition, out today, puts the figure for the end of 2009 at £4,048.3 billion against £3,922.6 billion in 2008. That is a rise of £125.7 billion. Mind you, if you apply a deflator – say that…

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God damn it, don’t you just feel richer…

God damn it, don’t you just feel richer…

When I see the house price indexes rising I can’t stop myself. I have to do a sum that estimates how much richer we are as a nation. Here’s how I do it. I head straight for the Blue Book (a set of the nation’s annual accounts, if you like) and flick (metaphorically, as I use the pdf version) to the balance sheet numbers. That is table 10.2 in the current edition to be precise. It tells me that the…

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