Feb 19 2008
Gulp! 2012 Looks like it will be fun
According to the government 2012 will be a year of plenty with the golden shower of the Olympic Games to sustain us; but not everyone is quite so sanguine with fool.co.uk leading the chorus of doomsayers who believe that life could get very hard for people living in the UK.
Lets not discuss the cost of the Olympics which is bound to grow beyond its already gargantuan 10 billion sterling and lets not quibble over the supposedly huge tourism benefits which I personally doubt. Sure it put Atlanta on the map back in 84 but wasn’t Atlanta alredy putting itself on the map by reinventing itself as a new style Southern town. In the case of London it is already an enormous tourism destination and is unlikely to grown any more. Look at other Olympics cities and you realise that they simply get left with a portfolio of oversized venues that nobody really wants to use.
The Fool have a come up with a list of depressing predictions about what the UK will look like in 2012 as far as personal finance is concerned that is enough to make anybody want to emigrate (by 2012 the imploding Spanish property market will have bottomed out so there might be a place to start)
- The average house will be worth £13,000 less in 2012 than today
- Seven out of ten credit applications will be rejected
- House Price to Earnings ratio will improve for the first time since 1995
- Pensioners will be worse off in 2012 than in 1980
- Households face an £8,000 shortfall in their family budget in 2012
So the good news is that P/E for housebuyers will have improved: the bad news for houseowners is that is because houses will have fallen in value over the next five years. Points 4 and 5 are certainly the most distressing in real terms since we are talking about the potential impact that inflation and the ravening jaws of government taxation will have on our purse!
Is this a worse case scenario? Quite probably not as some commentators are suggesting in hushed tones that the UK will stagnate for ten years as the reality of global shifts become more apparent to our economy. Notably the move from Europe to the East which is only just beginning to consume and where savings ratios are very high. If that trend continues then when recession does come we can expect our economy to sink further and faster than elsewhere.
