Tag Archives: mortgage

Up goes the interest rate – down goes the economy

The Bank of England: its interest rate rise will not reduce inflation but increase it.

The Bank of England has raised the UK’s base rate of interest on money lent by financial organisations to five per cent, in line with expectations after the government failed to bring down inflation.

The inflation rate remained at 8.7 per cent in May, due to Brexit, profiteering by firms including energy companies and businesses in food supply chains, and… interest rate rises that have pushed up the cost of money.

The higher interest rate is intended to give mortgage-holders less to spend – but in fact it means we all have less because businesses now factor interest rate rises into the prices they charge us.

It means that, in order to stop prices from rising, the Bank of England has pushed prices even further up.

The very rich will be able to cope with it, of course; they have more money in the first place. And they must have become rich somehow, meaning they’ll be able to make more money anyway.

(They’re probably the people who’ve factored the interest rate rise into their prices and will therefore take more money from us, especially if they have a share in energy firms, water companies or mortgage lenders).

Smaller businesses will go to the wall, of course. They aren’t selling items that are absolutely essential and in a country where wages have been artificially restricted to 2005 (or even turn-of-the-century) levels, people will cut non-essentials out of their spending.

The result: recession. And it’s a recession that could have been avoided if we didn’t have a gang of lunatic idiots running the nation’s finances.

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Is there really no alternative to Jeremy Hunt?

Jeremy Hunt: he’s so smug about the economic disaster his government has dropped on us.

Tory Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has been merrily telling us there’s no alternative to the latest round of interest rate rises that are making rich people richer and making poor people struggle to meet their mortgage payments.

And what’s he saying? “There is no alternative.”

Should we believe him? What’s behind his bluster?

Here’s Gary Stevenson:

So now you know.

When Jeremy Hunt says “there is no alternative”, he means we have no choice but to watch him and his oily city chums sucking all the life out of the economy, sapping your spending power in a feeding frenzy that can only end in disaster.

Still, it’s good that Boris Johnson has gone, isn’t it?

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If you’ve got a mortgage, look how much the Tories have added to it

Of course, if you live in the UK, you’ll be lucky to have a mortgage at all… these days.

But if you have… well, you won’t be feeling very lucky at the moment:

Will you?

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Inflation means continued cost-of-living hell for you; not so much for the Tories

Jeremy Hunt: he’s all right, Jack, because he has public money propping up his worthless hide. You aren’t so lucky.

Inflation figures for March 2023 have been released – and they foretell continued agony for struggling UK citizens who are trying to make ends meet in the face of Tory tomfoolery.

The baseline figure has – stubbornly, we are told, as if inflation is a sentient creature – remained above 10 per cent, falling from 10.4 in February just three-tenths of a percentage point to 10.1 per cent in March.

The reason wasn’t energy prices this time, though. No… it’s food.

The average price of food and non-alcoholic drinks has risen by a whopping 19.1 per cent in the year to March 2023 – the sharpest 12-month increase since August 1977.

This is partly because the availability of fruit, vegetables and sugar was hit by poor harvests in Europe and North Africa.

And importing those goods has become more expensive because the pound’s performance on the currency markets has been weak.

Furthermore, higher energy bills have meant increased transport costs and global supply chain disruption between March 2022 and January this year.

These energy bills, caused by the war in Ukraine, have forced producers to hike their prices.

Much of the above can be attributed to Brexit, which has added hundreds of pounds to the average UK household shopping bill due to increased transport and customs costs.

And the domestic apple-growing industry has suffered due to a lack of workers from the Continent, high energy costs, and low cash returns from supermarkets that buy the produce.

And prices are unlikely to fall:

Martin Deboo, consumer goods analyst at Jefferies, warned that the high prices are unlikely to fall, following the sharpest 12-month increase since August 1977.

He said: “Absolute pricing rarely falls very much.

“We expect consumers to be paying permanently more for products in 2023 onwards than they did in 2021.

This is particularly bad news for those of us on lower incomes, who are already struggling to make ends meet.

The Bank of England may decide that another interest rate increase is necessary, in which case many people with mortgages may be in danger of losing their homes.

In the midst of this, Chancellor of the Exchequer Jeremy Hunt has stepped in to claim – improbably – that “we can get through this”:

This Writer wonders who the “we” might be who can “get through this”. Is it just high-waged Tories?

I think Hunt’s words are a sop for people who are about to lose much of what they have spent their lives building – due to the ignorance and stupidity of the Conservative government in which he is a senior figure.

He just wants to keep us all tranquillised and quiet so we don’t end up protesting French-style.

But if anybody has an excuse to set their country on fire, it’s us.

The super-selfish Tories, with their Brexit and their privatisations, have deliberately harmed our quality of life. Saying “we can get through this” is no consolation at all.

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Interest rate rise will affect YOU. Read this to understand how

The bank of England has just imposed the biggest interest rate rise in a generation – increasing the base rate to three per cent.

There’s no reason for it. The inflation we’re facing isn’t caused by any reasons that an interest rate rise can combat – and energy prices are falling back to normal levels. The hike in interest rates will not affect the cost-of-living crisis in any way.

Instead, it will prolong the recession that the Bank of England has already said will be the worst in many years – if not the worst ever:

And this will affect you – as Martin Lewis explained on Good Morning Britain:

Buckle up, buttercup! It’s going to be a long, hard winter – because the bankers (who, by the way, have had their ability to give themselves unlimited bonuses restored by the Tories) want you to suffer.

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Jeremy Hunt’s financial statement – and Martin Lewis’s reaction [VIDEO]


New Chancellor Jeremy Hunt has made a statement reversing almost all the economic measures announced by the previous Chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng.

Money Saving Expert Martin Lewis reacts to his words:

What do you think? How will this affect you – or have you not considered this?

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Martin Lewis on why government must act BEFORE CHRISTMAS on mortgages

The ‘Money Saving Expert’, Martin Lewis, spoke up on ITV’s Good Morning Britain to urge the government to act on mortgage costs, saying a plan is needed before Christmas:

He highlighted three core issues: interest rates, the affordability test and correction in the house price market:

Mr Lewis also spoke about the government’s decision not to run an information campaign on how to save money on energy bills – and how it is lunacy to suggest such a campaign is too expensive when it could save millions from what the government is expecting to pay to energy firms when subsidising our bills:

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Are you ready to lose your home to Tory economic stupidity?

The rise in interest rates means people with mortgages are having to pay more to keep their homes than at any time since the late 1980s.

Many of them won’t be able to sustain the payments at a time when the cost of living is rising across the board. That means people are going to lose their homes.

Here’s a video to explain it:

The issue was also discussed on the BBC’s Any Questions – with politicians predictably disagreeing wildly about the solution (I’ve had to split the audio file into three for upload purposes:

So we can have cheap, new housing – but it will be built on our valuable Green Belt land.

Or we can have cheap, new housing – but in unregulated zones created by the Tory government, and therefore probably won’t be worth having.

Whatever housing is offered to us, it probably won’t have the social infrastructure surrounding it that people actually need in order to live there.

Let’s be honest: This Writer can’t see any of the above as being a solution.

This Tory-created nightmare is just creating problem after problem.

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The Pound has plummeted; now interest rates will skyrocket. Here’s how it harms YOU

The grinning Kwarteng: do you think he intended to cause the chaos he has inflicted on the United Kingdom, and was actually laughing to himself about it during the Queen’s funeral?

Up close and very personal.

If you’ve got a mortgage, the amount you pay towards it depends on interest rates.

If they are going through the roof, then you may suddenly find that you don’t have enough to pay for your home – and, shortly afterwards, that you don’t have a home to live in.

Remember, the lower Pound means food will cost a lot more than it does already; we import 40 per cent of our food from the EU.

Now watch this:

The keyword from this is: unsustainable.

The answer, if the grinning Kwasi Kwarteng is still determined to avoid a windfall tax on energy firms’ profits, is higher taxes or cuts to public services – and he has cut the 45 per cent tax bracket.

So you can expect the axe to fall on public services – probably before the end of the year. That will mark the end of the UK’s society as you know it. Bye, Britain, it was nice knowing you (back in the 1970s before the Thatcher rot set in)!

Unaffordable food, housing (and energy, let’s not forget); a savage attack on public services to come. Is this what you wanted?

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Tories are forcing ‘mortgage prisoners’ to pay up to three times a competitive interest rate

Houses: are their mortgages competitive or will buyers become ‘mortgage prisoners’ because of decisions made, not by them, but by the Tory government?

Is this part of that “bonfire of red tape” that David Cameron and his cronies were trumpeting a few years ago?

I wonder how many of the quarter-of-a-million so-called “mortgage prisoners” merrily voted Tory in the belief that this meant they would find it easier to switch lenders.

And I wonder how they feel, now they know that the opposite is the case.

The salt in their wound, of course, is the fact that it is the Tory government itself that sold their mortgages to unregulated lenders – and is now blocking a change in the law that would help them.

Tougher affordability checks have made it hard to change lenders if a home owner’s mortgage is large compared to the price of their house, if they are close to retirement or have bad credit.

While many lenders are able to switch to different deals with the same lenders, that have lower interest rates, around 250,000 are blocked from doing this because the lenders to whom the Treasury sold their mortgages don’t offer such deals.

The upshot is that they are stuck forking out two or three times what they would pay in a competitive mortgage.

The House of Lords has passed an amendment to the Financial Services Act to cap rates for borrowers in that position, but government whips are instructing Conservative MPs to vote against the amendment on Monday.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak reckons capping the interest rate would be “unfair” on other borrowers.

I don’t see why. How is it unfair to let these people have the same deal as everybody else?

Or does Sunak mean it would be unfair on the lenders to deprive them of one- or two-thirds of their profits?

Should we perhaps be asking questions about how the Treasury chose these particular firms to receive these particular mortgages?

Is this another aspect of the lobbying scandal that we have yet to grasp?

Source: Treasury snubbing ‘mortgage prisoners’, say MPs – BBC News

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