1 UK smells a housing bubble (Heather Stewart & Patrick Wintour in The Guardian) A record number of people work in estate agents offices and the sector is growing so fast that it amounted to the fastest growing part of the national workforce in the three months ending in June, according to official figures. The Office for National Statistics said that 562,000 people are employed in real estate in the UK, the largest number since records began in 1978, with 77,000 joining the industry over the last year – data that added to fears that the country is heading for a house price bubble.
"We're no longer a nation of shopkeepers – we're becoming a nation of estate agents," said Danny Gabay, director of economics consultancy Fathom. "I would certainly agree that the economy has turned a corner; my concern is about how sustainable this recovery will be, given that it is based on using government subsidies to encourage already over-extended households to take on even more debt to finance their consumption."
Growing confidence in the outlook for the housing market has been a key component of the economic upturn that led Osborne, to claim in a speech that the UK is turning a corner. But the swelling army of estate agents led some commentators to warn that the recovery was too reliant on debt-fuelled growth
Fears of a housing bubble have intensified since the Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, introduced the policy of forward guidance, under which the Bank's monetary policy committee has sent a strong message that it expects to keep interest rates at their record low of 0.5% for at least the next three years.
2 India outlook gloomy (Anant Vijay Kala in The Wall Street Journal) Indian economic indicators scheduled to be released this week are unlikely to bring much cheer for the struggling South Asian economy. While Indian stocks and the rupee have strengthened this week on growing optimism that the country will be able to find a way out of its current rut, the next round of economic data may not be good, economists said.
Industrial output is likely to show a further contraction in July while in August both wholesale and consumer price inflation rates were probably stuck at levels well above the central bank’s comfort levels. The median of 16 estimates on industrial production, which includes manufacturing, mining and electricity, is for a 0.5% contraction in July compared to the year earlier. That would make it the third consecutive month that output shrank. It fell 2.2% in June and 2.8% in May.
Although the pace of contraction appears to be slowing, it still reflects a stubborn slowdown in Indian industry which is struggling with weakening consumer appetite and costlier financing in the wake of India’s central bank’s restrictive money policies aimed at controlling inflation. Inflation rates may get worse before they get better, some economists said. Things could start looking up in the next few months though, some economists said.
3 Lifestyle in 2250 (Jonathan Power in Khaleej Times) In 1776 Adam Smith published his “Wealth of Nations” which has guided economists and political thinkers ever since. It marks the start of the Industrial Revolution that began in England and then spread throughout most of the world. That was 237 years ago. Where will we be 237 years hence? Presumably just as today we listen to Mozart, born 257 years ago, and watch or read Shakespeare, born 439 years ago, they have survived all changing tastes and spread well outside their original orbit of European culture to countries as varied as Japan, China, Argentina, Tanzania and South Korea, we can be sure that generations to come will have much the same cultural interests.
In all likelihood in 2250 we will probably still enjoy tastes picked up from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — perhaps the Beatles, Picasso, some of the outstanding Nigerian and Indian novelists writing today or the pristine recordings of the magnificent Chinese classical violinists and pianists now emerging. We won’t have better artists — who can ever rival Tchaikovsky, Leonardo da Vinci, Tolstoy or Shakespeare — but a handful that are as good.
Our religions will persist, for Christians mainly among the less well educated. Astronomy will probe to the very edge of our universe and to universes beyond (if they exist as is suspected) but still does not find God to settle the debate on belief for all time.
In 2250, for most, all possible economic and material needs will be satisfied. People will be satiated by progress on this front. There will also be a flowering of the arts. Space travel will have made mining on the moon an everyday practice and space ships (unmanned), taking 150 years to travel so far, will have explored the distant reaches of our galaxy, beaming back intimate pictures of far space with tantalising glimpses of black holes.
Democracy and the observance of human rights will prevail. The Catholic Church, Judaism and Islam will no longer be theocracies. Atheistic, non-violent, Buddhism will be ever more popular as the source of a universal moral code and Buddha’s denunciation of war will make military conflict and the abuse of human rights regarded as the practice of inferior human beings. The words of the American political thinker, Michael Mandelbaum, who wrote in the early 21st century, will have been shown to be spot on: “The great chess game of international politics is finished. A pawn is now just a pawn, not a sentry standing guard against an attack on the king.”
4 In Spain, a lottery to allot jobs (Sydney Morning Herald) The day Jose Antonio Perez Zembrana, 32, won the lottery here, he did not jump for joy or shout out. He was pleased, of course. But around him were so many people from this village in the south of Spain who could have used the prize: two months of work selling admission tickets to the municipal pool.
"What am I going to do with the money?" said Perez, who once worked in an aluminum factory but was sitting behind a flimsy folding table at the pool entrance recently. "What I am going to do is not spend all of it and keep some of it for the hard times that will come after." With the unemployment rate here close to 50 per cent, Alameda's mayor Juan Lorenzo Pineda Claverias has taken a novel approach to hiring for many of the municipality's jobs. Once a month, he draws folded bits of paper from a clear plastic container to decide who will get work. The event is public and covered by local television so everyone can see there is no cheating.
The first time
Pineda did the raffle, there were about 30 names in the hopper for a handful of
cleaning jobs lasting one month. Now, after nearly six years of recession,
there are about 500 people on the list of hopefuls for the same number of jobs.
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