28 October

House prices in Australia. You can see the exact time the catastrophe started. Not coincidentally the reign of the ‘lying rodent’ (his party’s own words), John Howard. Also the time we began bashing migrants, another of his rodent innovations. Fiddling with interest rates just brutalises ordinary people, bankrupting them. As Ian Verrender writes today, regulators could limit home loans to a certain multiple of income. That would kill this casino overnight. Ultimately though all that makes housing affordable is government building and selling it at controlled prices. History will show you that was the ONLY time in all of history homes were affordable for ordinary people.