Regular readers will want to take a deep breath. Sit down, perhaps. Ready? Here goes. This week I have looked at two houses, both of which would suit quite well. I am thinking of putting in a bid on one of them. Shocking stuff, right? But there’s more. Last month my husband and I scrapped our old Golf and made one VW dealer’s year by buying a new car. And just today I went on the internet to look at prices for a new pram (not an eBay one, a new one).
The bulls will look at this and considerme something of a one-woman green shoot. But then the bulls seem to be able to turn just about any old piece of statistical irrelevance into a green shoot. There was the fact that Nationwide reported house prices falling by only 0.4% in April, a minute shift upwards in mortgage approvals, a rise in consumer confidence and, says The Times, “glimmers of hope” from key purchasing managers’ surveys of the services and manufacturing sectors.
But all these bits and bobs of goodish news are nothing next to the wider picture, the one in which our banking crisis remains unresolved, unemployment is rising fast, UK GDP is contracting at its fastest rate for decades, and both corporate and personal bankruptcies are soaring. The rise in consumer confidence only makes sense when you remember that it is still very low by historical levels, that low interest rates make people with lots of debt happy, and that the most recent survey was taken before Alistair Darling’s latest misery Budget.
Back to me. The fact that I am looking at houses tells you nothing about the UK housing market in the medium or long term. It just tells you that we haven’t anything to sell, that we don’t much like our rather dark rental flat, that we can’t be bothered to move more than once more in the next decade, and that we have two small children who we need to settle. We aren’t the only would-be buyers around in this situation – there were several other people set to view my favoured house – but there certainly aren’t enough of us to drive a recovery in the housing market. For that to happen, the banking crisis needs to end.
The same goes for the car. We were forced buyers (I suspect this is something most Passat owners have in common). Indeed, if it weren’t for the fact that our new baby was born into the credit crunch, we’d still have the Golf. At the start of a crisis everyone stops spending. Then just like us, they need to buy a few things. So they do. So various indicators tick up. But that doesn’t mean they’ll stay up: the move reflects the effect of one-off delayed purchases, rather than anything more sustainable. So you see, I’m not a green shoot. Like much of the seemingly positive news knocking around at the moment, I’m just a blip.