John Humphrys asks: are we at last pulling out of recession? Or are we simply seeing the inflating of a bubble that one day will burst?
Rising house prices are often seen as a sign that an economy is picking up. That’s certainly how things look in the United States at the moment where the cost of a house has risen over ten percent in the last year and economic optimism has lifted accordingly. Here in Britain house prices are also on the rise, at the fastest rate for six years. So does this mean we’re at last pulling out of recession? Or are we simply seeing the inflating of a bubble that one day will burst?
One of the features of the ‘Great Recession’, as the economic dumps of the last few years have come to be known, was that the housing market essentially went dead. The building of new houses virtually ground to a halt despite the fact that the need for new houses, especially to accommodate younger first-time buyers, was and remains so great. At the same time anyone wanting to raise...
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