Stucco sticking
SOME of the cream paint would then come off the stucco. Those signs of the top of the house market may have been telling the truth. Two months I listed nine of them, beginning with builders in BMWs and house agents in Porsches, and going on to glossy catalogues got up as magazines and `Dear Householder' letters marked Private and Confidential. The arithmetic tells its own story, too. So long as the rate of infla- tion for house prices is higher than the cost of borrowing money, borrowing to buy a house amounts to a free ride. House-price inflation is still in double figures, but prices are sticking. Borrowing money to buy assets whose prices are static can be an expensive hobby, and if prices fall (and the Halifax thinks that, on balance, they are falling) it can be ruinous.
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