Disillusioned by their experience of other forms of investment, increasing numbers of people are putting money into houses—their own or those they buy to let to others—to provide a nest-egg for...

The great fear of homeowners is that a drop in prices will leave them in the state of negative equity—when you can only sell your home for less than you still owe on it—that afflicted so many at...

The first law of bubbles is that they burst. It may take much longer for them to do so than anyone expects, but in the end, they do. It is a matter of simple arithmetic that house prices cannot...

Today the National Housing Federation published a damning report on England's housing market, describing it as "distorted and dysfunctional," with research by Oxford Economics predicting that house...

Britain's financial services sector is booming, as everyone knows. It generates jobs, provides vast amounts of tax revenue, contributes a surplus of nearly £20bn to the trade balance and helps make...

What's the significance of a two-dollar wine winning an open tasting competition to find California's best Chardonnay? Not a lot, according to many critics. As they point out (in places like the...

Shorthand thinking means that inflation is now simply identified as an increase in prices. This is a dangerous misconception, as higher prices on their own are in fact deflationary. This point was...

I've started the week £50 better off thanks to a canny spread bet I had placed on Labour's likely performance at the next general election. A few months ago, anticipating a "Brown bounce" once the...

Yes, says Ha-Joon Chang in this month's Prospect—at least for infant industries in developing countries. Against what he calls the "neoliberal orthodoxy"—privatisation of state assets, limited...

In the latest issue of Prospect magazine, Paul Collier reviews two books, Lawrence Harrison’s The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change A Culture and Save it from Itself and my How Rich...