Things that are just bafflingly expensive

Yeah, but guess what they fill it up with to make up the volume!

9. pro audio gear

Ha! I'd say high-end consumer audio gear is worse cos at least you know you're guaranteed good, accurate sound with the pro stuff but, again, the "high-end" thing kinda exempts it from the bafflingly expensive tag. It's "high-end", of course it's going to be pricey (even if yr £2,000 CD player is just a cheap Philips transport, some mass-produced electronics, a massively-overspecified PSU and some dubiously-placed vacuum tubes in a chunky brushed-steel box and sounds no better than a Sony at a tenth of the price).

fucking tossers.

-- Nathalie (dotdotdo...), January 5th, 2007.

it's worth the price because you know they pay the miners well -- a bit like fair trade coffee, but more bling.

Katrina and Rita destroyed much of the 2005 crop up the path of the storm, LA and MS, but the yield here is higher this year. The 2006 Georgia crop is only half of '05's because of a warm winter, and Texas' crop is down because of lack of rain.

“You need a good, cold winter for the tree to go into dormancy, and we haven’t had that in the past few years,” Leger said. “That doesn’t mean the tree won’t produce. It just produces a lower amount of pecans.”

OK, why are green cardomums more expensive than any other curry spice (except maybe saffron)?

xpost

SO OTM it hurts.

We looked at an identical flat to ours to buy nearly two years ago and it would have cost over £300 more a month to buy rather than stay renting our current place +£100 in leasehold charges + other assorted repairs (£630 pcm). House prices have apparently gone up 15% in Brighton since then...

You could just as well say [size of housing stock remaining fairly constant]+[desire for buy-to-let as an investment alternative to underperforming pensions]=[demand to buy outstrips supply]+[demand to rent met by supply]. This needn't necessarily be a bubble, it could just be a change in market (and cultural) conditions.

It's probably a bubble, mind.

cross posts

For houses in particular and especially on buy-to-let, the "real" future value is basically their rental return, which isn't increasing much beyond inflation. More bubbles than Fairy, here.

But you can't live in tulips. xposts

Hm, that analysis looks like it's examining the housing market in a vacuum to me, without reference to outside factors like a disastrous pensions system and a tax system which (I think) has been geared to encourage the private rented sector since the 80s.

Also it seems to me that a lot of the buytolettists are only looking to cover costs, because what they want is the asset at the end, which warps the concept of "real" value a bit, doesn't it?

Anyway, as I say (and as I've likely just demonstrated) I don't know what I'm on about.

Yes and no. The buytolettists are probably the ones driving the bubble, to be honest. Like everyone who wanted in on this South Seas company, they see a quick buck.

But the prices they're paying mean that quickly the rent they have to charge even to cover costs vastly outstrips the price renters will pay. The owners can take a loss, but eventually they'll have to get rid of the house. If that happens to a lot of people, the price will drop dramatically -- and the bubble bursts.

Your points about the market are good, but the reason a bubble is easier to see in houses is that everyone needs to live somewhere. The rental value is the price they're prepared to pay for that. If the cost of a house vastly outstrips it, it has been put there by some other factor. If that factor is actually based on the potential rental value that it's now outstripping, there's a big problem there.

Does that make sense? Speaking as someone who dropped economics to spend more time in bed on other things.