A Time of Magic

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With the housing market moving so slowly at the moment it’s a good time to start looking at non-traditional means of selling your place.

Most people stop at the estate agent and then sit back waiting for something to happen but these days you have a number of effective options open to you. Those who are already using adwords for other things often start to use it to place adverts for their property. Expensive for sure but quite effective too.

Another option is to list your place on one of the new free listings sites. For example Great Property Direct is an offshoot of one of the top listed holiday rental listings companies thus already has good visibility on the search engines.

Let’s face it, we’re all getting older but none of us really want it to show, do we?

That’s led to a massive industry that covers everything from fitness clubs to reduce those sagging bit to lotions & potions to do something about the sagging bits on our faces. Whilst many of us are either too busy or, frankly, too lazy to do much on the exercise front at least we can do something easily enough on the wrinkle from with top wrinkle creams that’ll cover up all those cracks and even some that have been shown to do something or other somewhat deeper to actually slow down the arrival of the wrinkles in the first place.

Now, “all” you need to do is get that credit card out…

One of the peculiar things about international banking is that whilst the central banks can control the interest rate or the exchange rate, they can’t control both at the same time. Through in their desire to keep a handle on inflation and you’ve a really complicated affair indeed.

For instance, normally the tactic to get inflation down is to increase interest rates which in turn will keep the exchange rate quite high in respect of other currencies. That works well for a while except that with a high exchange rate you can find yourself sucking in a lot of cheap imports after a while which, of course, isn’t really that good for the economy. In times past, that would have signaled the onset of import controls to correct the problem but that’s rarely a runner these days.

The other problem is that this time around, it’s not runaway lending by the banks that’s getting inflation up, it’s the oil price. Therefore, no matter what the interest rate is, it’ll not make a whole lot of difference in inflation, so why do they bother? Basically because that’s how they’ve always done it. Yes, they know that it’s largely the oil price that’s driving inflation upwards but the only weapon that central banks have left to them is the interest rate so they keep that up knowing that all it’s doing is hurting the economy.

Having said all that, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way out of the mess this time.