The media seen determined to talk up a recession. Heard a Radio 4 show yesterday about 'how the cwedit cwunch affects you'.
First half a dozen calls were from people who's business's were doing fine, so the presenter said "now lets hear from people who have been badly affected" and the rest of the show was doom & gloom.
The remit of the programme was obviously to show how bad things were and the callers were selected to reflect that view. Most of the media follow this trend.
So, just wondered, I know there are quite a few self employed chaps on the group, how is the cwedit cwunch affecting you?
Thankfully it doesn't seem to be affecting me at all, quite the opposite, but thats possibly because of my niche market in smaller jobs.
Just wait until the bodgers, sorry 'tradesmen' from the big building companies who lay them off start up in competition. They'll take all their cut-quality bodge-it methods and cheap materials and under cut you.
Mind you the marginally-better-off will be commissioning a lot of extensions and renovations rather than just move.
I think the media are worsening the situation in quite a big way. Our company employed about 90 tradesmen on a self-employed basis 3 months ago, the media start blabbing about the credit crunch and a few of the larger companies we are contracted to decide overnight to almost stop any forward building works and 'ask' us and other contractors to take a 10% or more cut to our contracted price to enable them to continue to offer buyers a reasonable price. This will apply to any new contracts also. It also seems that quite a few of these large companies have also used the 'credit crunch' as an excuse to trim down those that they employ directly and make quite a few redundancies.
As a large percentage of our work is with these companies, it has meant that we have had to lay off quite a few of our lads and the number is now down below 50. We have been in this situation before and are confident that we will weather it.
The smaller builders have mostly carried on as normal - pricing is a bit more competitive as expected but they don't seem to be panicking and have carried on almost as normal for the time of year. We have started pricing - and winning - contracts for the smaller builders to keep the lads going but a good percentage of those that we had to let go recently have found other work and are doing fine, albeit at a slight reduction in rates but nothing that can't be remedied by working a couple of hours extra each week.
There seems to be plenty of work out there if you don't mind looking around for it.
I'm not so sure - the excessive house prices meant it was often cheaper to extend than move. If house prices go back to sensible levels this may not still be the case. Round here the present fad is basement conversions - which cost as much as a brand new house in some areas...
The proprietor of a music shop that I do work for, described it to me the other day, as "a self-fulfilling prophesy". He reckons that his sales have gone down the toilet, although his PA rentals are fine. He told me that he was talking to one of the village builders, who told him that he had been planning to purchase two new vans this summer. He also said that he had work, money in the bank, and that his books were about where he had expected them to be. However, he wasn't now going to buy the vans because of fears over the cc. So that's a garage somewhere that's lost a sale of two commercial vehicles - not because the guy hasn't got the money, or the work to support them, but simply because the situation has been talked up to where he doesn't have the confidence to buy them.
I have been self employed for many years, and I have certainly never known the work level to be as poor as it is at the moment. Like Dave says about extending rather than changing your house, you would have expected that punters would have been having more kit repaired than buying new, but they are actually doing neither. I have probably a fifth of the repair income that I had just a year ago, and a couple of other shops that I do work for, are in despair over it. I have to say that it has picked up a little this week, which I expect is due to people returning from the first wave of summer holidays.
I think that there are several factors that have contributed to the current situation. First, Bush and Blair's "war on terror", the major effect of which has been to seriously destabilse the middle east, which has partly led to the debilitating rises in vehicle fuel and other energy costs, which has had knock-on effects on the prices of just about everything, and has caused consumers to think twice about any 'unnecessary' expenditure, whether they've got the money or not. Next, it doesn't help with Mervyn Wossisname from the Bank of England and his counterpart in the US, going on TV all the time spouting doom gloom and despondency about world recession. It then doesn't help that the media pick up on this, and hype it up into 'important' headlines. It was unfortunate that Northern Rock relied on world money markets tied heavily to the US lenders. It wasn't really their fault that they got their fingers burnt - it could have been virtually any of them - but again, media hype caused a serious problem which has served only to further weaken consumer confidence.
At the moment, we have a weak PM who is a very poor performer in terms of interfacing with the public and addressing their concerns. I didn't like Blair, and I think that his policies have a lot to do with the situation we find ourselves in at the moment, but say what you like about him, he had the public face of charisma and charm, and I don't think that public feeling would be as negative as it is at the moment even given the same underlying conditions, if he were still the boss ...
We also currently have a poor and inept chancellor. Add to this the general disarray that the government finds itself in, and it's no wonder that consumer confidence and spending is low. I have a memory long enough to draw parallels with the pre-Maggie days, and I fear that we are not going to see much in the way of recovery until we have a change of government. I know a number of Maggie's early policies were harsh and unpopular, but at the end of the day, she did what was necessary to dig the country out of the financial hole that it had gotten itself into, and I have a feeling that we just might find history repeating itself over the next few years ...
Rant over ! Time to do some work. Oh yes, forgot, done it all already this week .... d;~}
Boom bust. The nature of the global economy. Nothing to do with governments any more I suspect, which is probably a good thing on balance. With capital gains tax on housing, we might not be quite so far up the creek in that area. The market could adjust more easily if the playing field was level to start with.
This particular crisis has been brewing well over three years, as the rising graphs of chinese consumption, and US and European debt and balance of payments were set to cross the much less rapidly rising levels of commodity consumption.
A government of responsibility would have been reining in expenditure and reducing its debt exposure hard.
Capital gains tax on house transactions merely makes if disadvantageous to move homes, thats all.
This totally immobilizing the house-owning population: It would kill the house market stone dead, and force everyone into rental.
As usual, the solution actually worsens the problem.
Which is purely down to a small island with an expanding population and exapnding epectations.
Anyone who wants a £30,000 three bedroom house can get one in the USA easily enough right now..
A slightly 'simplistic' view of a complex set of circumstances perhaps, as GB has found out to his cost after boldly declaring that he had fixed boom and bust single handedly, forever ...
We have a fairly prominent hand car wash place that always has cars queuing round the block. Of late you just see the workers sitting about doing nothing.
The car park of some local shops is normally packed but look in there now and you would think the shops were closed.
Whatever it is, I think it's gonna get worse before it gets better .. :-(
Of course you don't mean GB, you mean GoreDoom Brown, during his tenure as Official Thief, while he was telling Toenails Blurr how much better he could run the country.
By the way, the solution is obvious: get George W Ambush to deny that the US has any plans to invade China this month.
In rural USA, £30,000 buys more than you'd think. I'd certainly be happy with it if I were a solo IT geek planning to live there for a couple of years and then return,
We have heard that its hitting some firms, those in building and construction work and some Taxi operators are finding their bookings rate down a bit..
What's really worrying is that my bro in law a bricklayer isn't booked up for more then a week or so at a time recently whereas for as long as I can remember getting him to do anything was a 2 year wait!..
Had her policies not closed the coal mines and subsequently squandered our oil and gas reserves in the quest for 'jam now' and to reward her paymasters we'd not have to be buying in so much energy from other counties.
I know it's the holiday season, but I drove across London yesterday evening and was amazed by the lack of traffic. It's a journey I do quite often, and it took about 75% of the usual time.
Dave Plowman (News) coughed up some electrons that declared:
Agree. I knew someone working for the electricity industry at the time it was privatised. From my understanding the whole point of coal vs gas fired power stations was that coal and nuclear provide the base load generation capacity and gas is there to satisfy peak demand (especially unpredicted) and provide system stability.
The way it was sold off made it economically attractive to burn gas flat out which is plain dumb. Why? What's coal good for: not a lot apart from generation and domestic coal fires. Where is coal going to provide least pollution: in a big central burner where the flue gasses can be scrubbed efficiently. IMHO we should be burning coal as a priority to satisfy base demand for electricity. Gas is a far more versatile resource that should be jealously preserved. Burning both gives rise to CO2, which is a separate problem.
A bit moot unfortunately, seeing as most of the coal mines are now closed. Though I do believe that outcome was the fault of the NUM as much as Thatcher.
The only viable option left at this time is to get on and build some nukes IMHO. Nothing wrong with being more efficient (Part L and so forth) but I don't think it's going to buy us out of trouble.
The next most viable option is to lay some extra DC cables to France (I notice there was an upgrade a while back) and let them build the nukes.
Dave Plowman (News) coughed up some electrons that declared:
I don't go upto Town any more, so can't comment. The business I'm working for is currently unaffected: our primary customers are dotted all over the globe, but of course bad things could still come our way given time.
The house sales market is utterly sh***ed down in Kent. Given up trying to sell my parent's old bungalow, hence the talk of renovation projects...
Notice builders are rushing to finish off a lot of new builds round here that have been lying 80% done for the last 6-9 months (why left to fester I don't know). Getting more cold callers with tenuous offers of labour to undertake strange work (fertilise and weed my lawn was yesterday's???).
Still see a lot of trades about in their vans, so either they like wasting diesel, or they are still busy. Quite a lot of traffic driving into Sutton (London) today.
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