In my last video – Castles of Sand? – I discussed the specific drivers behind UK, and specifically London, property prices. This video is a little different. In this, I ask how properties should be valued, and how they have been valued, looking at rental yields, income multiples and other factors. I also ask whether London, as a “Global City” is simply different. Robert Smithson Robert tweets as ‘@MarketWarbles’ Follow @MarketWarbles Tweet
Only in the UK is the phrase “property porn” a real thing. Home prices dominate polite conversation. And little wonder: housing dominates UK personal balances sheets. In no other country does it make up such an enormous share of assets. Why? Because UK property has outperformed that in other developed countries in the last 38 years. This video asks why that is, and asks if the UK property wealth rests in castles of sand. Robert Smithson Follow @marketwarbles Tweet
https://youtu.be/yLTg1aatqHs With the election of the Lega Nord and Five Star Movement in Italy, Target2 imbalances are growing again. The gap between the creditor nations (mostly Germany and the Netherlands) and the debtors (the PIIGS, less Ireland) is now back at levels last seen at the height of the Eurozone crisis. But wait. What are Target2 balances? Are they the result of Germany’s enormous current account surplus, or is there something else at work? More importantly, should you care about…
There are many economic statistics, some broadly useful, others bizarrely esoteric. Only one manages to be both useless and dangerous. Worse: it’s trumpeted by journalists, so you may even have been taken in yourself. Welcome to the worst economic statistic. Robert Smithson Robert tweets as MarketWarbles follow him by clicking the follow button below Follow @marketwarbles Tweet
Hi All, It’s Robert (rcs1000) here, and I’m using the Politicalbetting soapbox to promote a venture that OGH and I are involved in: Crowdscores. The goal of Crowdscores is to crowdsource sports data. So, instead of buying offical data from Opta, we get fans at the game (or watching TV) to tell us what the score is, who scored etc. We’re getting a lot of traction with this model: more than 10,000 people use our app each week, and it…
Regular PBer’s will know that five years ago I built VIPA, a model that attempted to look at proportionate swings on a party-by-party basis to model results. This model was – to be quite frank – stolen by Nate Silver, and he used it with much bally-ho. While VIPA did a better job of predicting the 2010 election than UNS (it was noticeably more pessimistic on the LibDems than UNS, for example), it was not perfect. And so, 11 months…
Hello PB’ers, This is Robert, Mike’s son and the technical administrator for the site. I’d just like to use the site as an advertisement for a business I’m involved in, Crowdscores. The idea is simple: crowdsourced football scores. Fans watching games record goals, and the like, and this means that we have the fastest football scores around. (We also have a nice line in fan generated commentary.) Currently, we do Premiership, SPL, and European games. But this idea is perfectly…
It’s highly likely there will be problems with the new system. Please feel free to vent your frustrations in the thread below. Also: I will only be migrating the old comments over later. So, for now we’re likely to have an empty / shiny / new comment system. Thanks, Robert