Richard for once I partly ageree with you. Yes Gordon Brown is a conman. Yes he's done untold damage to the UK economy. But I still firmly believe that this is outweighed by its resiliance and the fact that the world economy will not tip into recession.

Yes there are problems in the US but to link the US and UK housing markets is totally misleading. The circumstances are not the same and we don't have anything like the same "sub-prime" issue in the UK.

There is a lot of insitutional money going into commodities currently but as I said before I think there is a real danger of us talking ourselves into problems rather than it being the reality. I don't know what papers you read but bad news is the only news which most of them are interested in. Those of us who remain optimistic (and how optimistic really depends on our own personal circumstances and nothing else) are the ones bucking the trend not you.

Good points Tom but you need to relate these figures to the increases that have been seen in recent years. So yes they are a correction and not a crash.

Similarly, a 7% drop in housing prices in Ireland or here is not a crash it's a minor correction for the same reasons. And prices may not recover for some time but that's not a disaster - it needed to happen.