Taking on a mortgage going forward...

[clv101]

It might be unacceptable to some but I suspect there will be more defaulters than savers. Where are the defaulters and their families going to go? Hotels?

Yeah, whatever happens most people will be able to stay in their houses, irrespective the financial situation. We'll never have a situation where 10% of the country's houses are empty and 10% of the population are homeless.

[UndercoverElephant]

It might be unacceptable to some but I suspect there will be more defaulters than savers. Where are the defaulters and their families going to go? Hotels?

Yeah, whatever happens most people will be able to stay in their houses, irrespective the financial situation. We'll never have a situation where 10% of the country's houses are empty and 10% of the population are homeless.

I'm not suggesting we will. I'm suggesting 10% of defaulters should end up renting and 10% of savers should be able to bid for their properties.

Are you seriously suggesting anything else???

If you are, then I have a serious problem with it.

[kenneal - lagger]

I'm not saying the situation will be fair, I just think that when TSHTF financial breakdown will will be sudden and complete.

[UndercoverElephant]

I'm not saying the situation will be fair, I just think that when TSHTF financial breakdown will will be sudden and complete.

And I don't agree. Everything we have witnessed since September 2008 suggests that TPTB will do everything possible to avoid TSHTF being sudden and complete.

[featherstick]

I'm with UE on this. Absolutely.

The government of the day will be faced with a small, coherent, powerful group of banks on the one hand, lobbying for legislation to throw defaulters out MORE QUICKLY so they can sell the property, and an atomised, incoherent group of families in default of their debt on the other hand, with little political clout or ability to organise, dispersed around the country. Even in a medium-fast collapse the banks will have some sort of rump function based on selling their assets even if its at pennies in the pound, and even if there's already someone living in them. I really don't think that anyone can expect their debt to simply evaporate.

[2 As and a B]

Why do people assume a nice bell-shaped curve for everything; that the downslope will be pretty much a mirror of the upslope? The world isn't like that - over-extension and collapse is the usual situation. This economic system will be extended way beyond what anyone thought it could and then, suddenly, it will break and collapse, like a bubble bursting. Our global industrial-financial society is so complex that when the sticking plaster fixes stop holding it together it will just disintegrate into bickering self-interest.

[Cabrone]

I suppose if you borrow a load of money, then the system goes splat, who is going to come round to demand their money? At least you might have somewhere to live, but probably nothing to eat, unless you buy a place with land to grow things.

I don't know why anyone thinks debt is going to evaporate in some sort of upheaval. It won't, short of the zombie apocalypse. Debt represents an asset and assets have value, and even if your credit institution - bank, building society, whatever - goes bust, the debt will be sold on to someone else, who will come looking for you to recover it.

If we get the sort of slow collapse that means there will be people trying to realise their purchased asset, in the form of a mortgage defaulter's house, the government would have to enact legislation to keep defaulters in their properties. There would be so many defaulters and so many empty houses that it would be unmanageable to chuck everybody out.

If you had the right sort of property in the right place, possession would be nine parts of the law. By the time full collapse arrives the possessor would be the owner.

What would the owner of your debt get from an empty house? No one would be able to buy it from them and if you have to pay a rent, what's the difference between that and a mortgage? The rent would be negotiable as everyone would be in the same boat.

Yes, there's going to an awful lot of people unable to pay their mortgages and TPTB will bend the rules to let them stay in bonded perpetuity. It's either that or social unrest on a grand scale.

Like Beria says it's just a case of when the tipping point is reached.

To those who think that might be unfair ask yourselves - when did fairness ever come into how society works?

Have you not learnt anything from how the bankers operated and how we've all being saddled with their gambling debts?

Unfortunately this is not a fair world.

[UndercoverElephant]

I don't know why anyone thinks debt is going to evaporate in some sort of upheaval. It won't, short of the zombie apocalypse. Debt represents an asset and assets have value, and even if your credit institution - bank, building society, whatever - goes bust, the debt will be sold on to someone else, who will come looking for you to recover it.

If we get the sort of slow collapse that means there will be people trying to realise their purchased asset, in the form of a mortgage defaulter's house, the government would have to enact legislation to keep defaulters in their properties. There would be so many defaulters and so many empty houses that it would be unmanageable to chuck everybody out.

If you had the right sort of property in the right place, possession would be nine parts of the law. By the time full collapse arrives the possessor would be the owner.

What would the owner of your debt get from an empty house? No one would be able to buy it from them and if you have to pay a rent, what's the difference between that and a mortgage? The rent would be negotiable as everyone would be in the same boat.

Yes, there's going to an awful lot of people unable to pay their mortgages and TPTB will bend the rules to let them stay in bonded perpetuity. It's either that or social unrest on a grand scale.

Like Beria says it's just a case of when the tipping point is reached.

To those who think that might be unfair ask yourselves - when did fairness ever come into how society works?

Some degree of fairness is required in order to preserve public order. Either fairness or repressive military/police action, and the latter is impossible in a proper democracy.

Have you not learnt anything from how the bankers operated and how we've all being saddled with their gambling debts?

Unfortunately this is not a fair world.

Not good enough, I'm afraid. There is a difference between the two situations. In the case of the bankers, everybody hates them and there's nothing anyone can do about it because of the way The System works. But in the case we are talking about here you are suggesting a one-off decision which will be grossly unfair to a large section of the population who have already been right royally shafted and benefits another large section who have been greedy and irresponsible. Telling the former group that "this is not a fair world" is likely to get you a knife in your back. Understand?? This would be a new sort of unfairness, and one which would put one section of the population at the throats of another. What you are suggesting would be the final insult to the people who are already claiming to have been "gilted" by previous generations. They would have every right to turn to violent protest, and this time not just directed at TPTB but at people like YOU.

The bottom line is this: if you force people into a position where they no longer have anything left to lose then they become VERY DANGEROUS to you. What you are suggesting does exactly this - it completes the gilting of the younger generation which is already driving "revolutions" in many other countries.

[Prokopton]

Either fairness or repressive military/police action, and the latter is impossible in a proper democracy.

... which we need not assume will continue of course.

[UndercoverElephant]

Why do people assume a nice bell-shaped curve for everything; that the downslope will be pretty much a mirror of the upslope? The world isn't like that - over-extension and collapse is the usual situation. This economic system will be extended way beyond what anyone thought it could and then, suddenly, it will break and collapse, like a bubble bursting. Our global industrial-financial society is so complex that when the sticking plaster fixes stop holding it together it will just disintegrate into bickering self-interest.

I'm not assuming a nice bell-shaped curve for the descent. Complex systems do not generally disintegrate in a controlled manner. What I'm saying is that we already know what strategies TPTB are employing to attempt to control the descent: high inflation, uber-low interest rates and the printing of money on an unprecedented scale. This does not suggest any "bubble bursting". The "bubble" already burst in September 2008 and the global economic system is already held together with sticking plaster - but it is stretchy sticking plaster.

This doesn't mean there isn't going to be an ever-increasing amount of bickering self-interest. Of course that is going to happen - nothing else could happen at a time when everybody is finding themselves poorer and poorer in real terms. But it does mean that the ultra-fast collapse scenario, where the cashpoints just stop working one day and TWAWKI just ends overnight is no longer a serious possibility.

[UndercoverElephant]

Either fairness or repressive military/police action, and the latter is impossible in a proper democracy.

... which we need not assume will continue of course.

If democracy fails in the UK then the world as we know it really will have ended. I am not assuming this won't happen, but on balance I do not expect it to happen in the forseeable future. I could of course be completely wrong about this...

[Prokopton]

You could, and the world won't end, but a lot of good things like civil liberty will. I'd say there is definitely a chance of it, esp. if you watch how the BNP are prepared to use peak.

The angrier people are at bankers, the more anarchists and communists are prepared for running street battles, the more the EDF wants to take them on, the more the conditions that produce such changes are there and they become possible. Just saying.

Has anyone read Dimitry Orlov? I gather the Soviet collapse he talked of produced some interesting results in terms of local gangs etc but haven't looked him up.

[UndercoverElephant]

You could, and the world won't end, but a lot of good things like civil liberty will. I'd say there is definitely a chance of it, esp. if you watch how the BNP are prepared to use peak.

Support for the BNP is currently collapsing. I don't know why, but that's what happened at the recent elections.

The angrier people are at bankers, the more anarchists and communists are prepared for running street battles, the more the EDF wants to take them on, the more the conditions that produce such changes are there and they become possible. Just saying.

I think most of the British public will continue to see the groups you mention as extremists - two different groups of extremists opposed to each other.

[Prokopton]

Well that's how it begins is all I'm saying! It's anger drives it onward. Those two groups were extremists in Germany as Weimar wobbled and no-one saw the Nazis coming!

I'm just saying it would be wise to keep an eye. The BNP support has tanked -- for now. And they are unprepossessing, but sadly, they aren't as stupid as they look.

EDIT:

Check this out from that link:

In fact, we're not just at Peak Oil. We're at Peak Grain, Peak Copper, Peak Uranium, Peak Fish, Peak Rare Earth Metals. All of which mean we're also inevitably at the Peak of the Milk of Human Kindness. From now on, the liberal elite can organise as many National Brotherhood Weeks as they like; tribalism and Nationalism will be the main currencies of human exchange.

These people are very clever at reading an angry mood and stoking it.

Just saying.

[Lord Beria3]

Prokopton - The BNP are a useless neo-fascist bunch of thugs whose political skills are awful. Considering the huge opposition to immigration (shown from poll after poll) you would have thought an anti-immigration party to have done well in the local elections and like the Greens have at least one MP in Parliament. They have done nothing of the kind.

There is room for a populist right-wing party - polls show that up to a half of the public would vote for one, but NOT a fascist party. The demise of the BNP is actually a bad thing for right-on liberals, it opens to the door for the emergence of more respectable kinds of right-wing populism, without all the racist, criminal and nazi baggage of the BNP.

Regarding Weimar Germany, this was a unique set of circumstances; hyperinflation, a defeat in a Great War, and a long history of authoritarian, anti-democratic and nationalistic undercurrents among both the elite and the public which undermined the republic from day one. Britain is a totally different case and with FPTP is highly unlikely to lead to any kind of far-right takeover.

Far more likely, is the shift to the right of the mainstream parties, with the BNP-isation of Labour and the Tories.