A Time of Magic

We all know that electronic things have been going down in price for a long time and that house prices have been going down for a year or two but what about everything else?

You might not think of books as something that would go down. After all, they need authors to write them and their salaries aren’t going down, plus they need seemingly perpetually increasing amounts of paper to print them on. Yet, whilst way back in 1981 the Encyclopaedia Britannica retailed for £600, you can buy the latest one (if you look around) for £450.

Houses might be dropping in price but surely house improvements would be more expensive? Well, we’re in the process of updating our kitchen and bathroom. Both are around the same price as the original cost some 30 years ago. And the new one will be much higher quality too.

It seems almost a case of looking around for things that aren’t decreasing in price.

One recent surprise was a whole host of “sold” signs in the local area that seemed to pop up over the course of just a few weeks.

That would be something of a surprise at any time to be honest. This isn’t an area known for really rapid house sales and these days you’d have expected that sales would go even slower. Well, to be fair, the sales did take quite a while as the signs have been up for months but to have so many “sold” signs going up in such a short time is quite surprising.

Of course, what remains to be seen is whether the signs will remain at “sold” or if they’ll go back to “for sale” which has happened fairly frequently over the past year. One wonders what terms the mortgage calculator will have turned up for the various purchasers. Somehow I suspect that there’ll be rather high deposits required and probably none too good interest rates.

Although we often think of America as a close cousin in every way, there’s lots of little differences that you just don’t expect.

Take bank transfers for instance. In the UK it’s a simple matter to transfer money from A to B but it’s only simple because the UK banking scene consists largely of a handful of big banks which operate pretty much right across the country. That being the case, they’ve had the opportunity to make standards stick and to implement a modern banking system.

In America it’s quite different. There you’ll find thousands of banks often dealing only with a local community. Instead of having a handful of banks with hundreds of branches as in the UK, there you’ll find hundreds of banks with only a handful of branches.

This difference has led to a much more community based approach in some cases. Thus the check by phone facility that exists in America has absolutely no counterpart in the UK for the simple reason that community banking just doesn’t exist in the UK: nobody would trust a system quite like the check by phone mechanism!