From: Steve Firth <%steve%@malloc.co.uk>
Newsgroups: uk.finance
Subject: Re: Am I stoopid for not buying a house?
Date: Mon, 2 Oct 2006 16:44:48 +0100

On 2 Oct 2006 08:38:24 -0700, hefferMiller@hotmail.com wrote:

> Steve Firth wrote:
>> On 2 Oct 2006 08:00:51 -0700, hefferMiller@hotmail.com wrote:
>>
>>> There was a property crash in the UK in the 90's.  Did the land mass
>>> suddenly expand?
>>
>> Care to compare property pices then and now, and share values then and now?
> 
> Your point being?

Have you lost your way in the thread?

>>> There was a property crash in Japan in the 90's.  Did the land mass
>>> suddenly expand?
>>
>> Ah reduction ad absurdem, coupled with the use of a strawman. Well done.
> 
> You'll have to explain your "reduction ad absurdem" and "strawman"
> comments.  Simply typing those words with your keyboard bears no
> weight.
> 
>>> No in both cases.  So it must be something else then, eh?  ...prices
>>> were too high.
>>
>> The US has low population density and a history of total and complete loss
>> of property value over and over again. Can you point to anything similar in
>> the UK in say the last hundred years or so?
> 
> Your implied comment was that property values will not fall in the UK
> because there is less land in the UK than in the US.

Umm no, my point was that comparing the US and the UK property markets and
trying to draw conclusions or indeed to make predictions about the timing
of events from one economy to the other is not valid.

>  However, house
> prices in the UK have fallen in the past even though there was a fixed
> amount of land before and after the fall (early 90's).  That shows that
> the supply of land is not the only factor in the movement or prices.
> It works the other way as well.  Why did prices rise so much, so
> quickly in the UK (past 5 years) when the amount of land and population
> size did not change much in that time?  If it is soley dependent on the
> amount of land, there would only be gradually rises.  This is
> elementary. 

And irrelevant as is the discussion about the overheated Japanese economy.