Tuesday, August 19, 2008

The UK building industry theme-time radio hour

Somewhat oddly, Tim Wheeler (not the one out of Ash) has tried to explain the current state of the UK property market by, erm, quoting Bob Dylan:

Tim Wheeler, chief executive of Brixton, turned to Bob Dylan on Tuesday to help explain the outlook for the UK property market.

Mr Wheeler said the opening lines of the American songwriter’s All Along the Watchtower “seem to capture the beleaguered mindset of the UK commercial real estate market”.

The song, more famously recorded by Jimi Hendrix, says of land that none “know what any of it is worth”.
[...]
Mr Wheeler said that the fundamental problem was how to assess property values when “there is no real depth of buyers and sellers”. Referring to the lines in the song, “there must be some way out of here, said the joker to the thief,” he said “if the ‘thieves’ are the funded or equity based opportunist buyers and the ‘jokers’ are the owners who won’t sell, there is ‘no way’ out of this impasse – yet.”

Wheeler's head actually exploded when he attempted to find a line in the song that could be used to illustrate the idea that by not committing to a stamp duty holiday, Alistair Darling has made the problem worse.


2 comments:

Paul Wells said...

I think the lines you are looking for are:

"Outside in the cold distance [the Treasury]
A wild cat [Alistair Darling] did growl.
Two riders [the credit crunch and the recession] were approaching,
And the wind [erm, the Daily Mail?] began to howl."
Excellent, Bob Dylan as economic Nostradamus. I'm going to sit down with the FT and a copy of Bringing It All Back Home to work out where to invest my shares portfolio. I'm sure the answers in Subterranean Homesick Blues somewhere...

CarsmileSteve said...

suggest investing heavily in PAWKING METERS and selling PUMP (due to broken handle)

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