Halligan's Iron Triangle of Influence 

Dealing with the opposition:

Who are the forces driving the failure of the Housing Market?

They are the ones who promote the mistaken belief that 

"It's just a question of Supply and Demand. Economics 101. Build more and prices will come down!"

This is just what the folks who like things as they are like to hear. 

They are the ones who are happy when journalists and  commentators spout this nonsense.

They the people who are very happy when politicians echo this back, and produce damaging Help-to-Buy schemes.

These are the people whose self-serving opposition has to be countered.

Who are they? Liam Halligan in his book Home Truths produces this brilliant image to explain the forces driving the failure of the Housing Market.

 THE IRON TRIANGLE of vested interests which have the Housing Market clamped into failure mode

Each of these three players benefit hugely financially from today’s crisis-stricken Housing Market and will fight tooth-and-nail to prevent it being changed.

The one change these three sides all fear is falling house prices. This must be prevented at all costs!

For the owner-occupiers it's fear of losing their ‘nest-eggs’, their legacies to the next generation, their wealth built up on ‘hard work’ (!) which will see them through to a comfortable retirement,

Banks who lend recklessly, trusting that house-prices never go down. Any crazy lending to NINJAs will soon be fixed by rising prices,

Housebuilders locked into this dysfunctional market, but by acting rationally make good profits out of land-banking and land speculation.

 These are the three most formidable interest groups who must be won over, by persuasion, by bribery, or by sheer brute force if necessary! 

 

So you think the Housing Crisis can be fix by BUILDING MORE?

Wrong! and here's the academic evidence, which clearly shows why

This is a paper by Ian Mulheirn from 2019 called Tackling the UK housing crisis: is supply the answer? 

So all of the dimwits who prattle on about

"Oh it's just a simple matter of Supply and Demand, Economics101. 

Build more--increase supply--and prices are bound to come down.!

Don't they realise that the Housing market is anything but normal?

Just the fact that most buyers, especially FTBs need a mortgage shows that the housing market is not 'normal'.

Not normal, in the way that markets for baked beans, laptops, cars or any other commodity operates.

Could this be a false Narrative put out by influential housing stakeholders in order to protect their unearned and undeserved Wealth?

Well, maybe.... See what Liam Halligan said about the IRON Triangle