Be Excellent To Each Other

Thanks to our "broken housing market", there's a lot of people mortgaged to the absolute hilt

Can people still get in that situation?

Also I got pre-approval recently for about 4.8x my base salary at 90% LTV.

Also I got pre-approval recently for about 4.8x my base salary at 90% LTV.

Who was that with?

Just guessing really but won't there be an index where the risk is lower as the salary goes up or something. i.e. you probably wouldn't get that if you were earning £20K a year.

Just guessing really but won't there be an index where the risk is lower as the salary goes up or something. i.e. you probably wouldn't get that if you were earning £20K a year.

Virgin. It was just a speculative thing I filled out on a whim.

My base salary is only around 2/3rds of my current compensation, so that's probably why it was so high.

I never quite worked out what lending they do against bonus and shares etc

Always got the impressions that bonus carried more weight than shares though.

That said you're looking at a 3 hour interview now to remortgage with the same provider. Research on this is putting me off my own plan to extend my current mortgage later this year. Getting this one that comes to renewal was hard enough to explain in the "easy" days.

Is that "new"? My fixed rate ended in September last year and about a month before it was due to end my provider sent me a letter offering me another mortgage product that was on a fixed rate for 2 years, at a lower interest rate than I was on.

Taking them up on the offer was literally a case of saying "yup, cool" and signing the documents they sent me through the post.

Is that "new"? My fixed rate ended in September last year and about a month before it was due to end my provider sent me a letter offering me another mortgage product that was on a fixed rate for 2 years, at a lower interest rate than I was on.

Taking them up on the offer was literally a case of saying "yup, cool" and signing the documents they sent me through the post.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/2017/02/19/exclusive-oxford-university-set-break-700-years-tradition-open/

"Oxford University might break with 700 years of tradition by establishing its first foreign campus in response to Brexit, The Telegraph can disclose. French officials met senior staff at Oxford last week and revealed new proposals that they hope would guarantee future European Union funding for a "satellite" base in Paris."

Christ.

Talking in Estonia, David Davis said yesterday that we wouldn't reduce EU migration into the UK for "years and years" and that we will still need significant immigration of unskilled workers from the EU after Brexit.

If you've heard talk of a "€60bn divorce settlement" but don't understand it, this is a pretty good summary: http://www.politics.co.uk/blogs/2017/02 ... ve-minutes

Lorries will be queuing from Dover to London trying to get into the EU

As you say, this (or any) Tory government is completely, and ideologically opposed to subsidies; what other outcome to this vote and local mandate could have possibly been expected?

He meant the other Tory government.

On immigration, i thought I saw something that said that the net inflow was now lower due to fewer people coming and more leaving due to feeling unwelcome or being uncertain of their future?

What about the 140000 who didn't vote for it?

I literally haven't the first clue what people are going on about here. My position is that Cornwall was stupid enough to very strongly vote for Brexit, so I have zero sympathy. No idea what this other shite is all about. You do know I voted against Brexit, right?

Then again, Mrs C and I got trollied last night, so I'm not at my best right now to be frank.

It was a chunk lower last year (it's measured Sep-to-Sep for some reason.) Faisal Islam had some analysis suggesting it most mostly down to reduced intake of students, in particular from Asia; with other demographics being close to flat.

But let's still celebrate the numbers, eh? Idiot British red top press.

What about the 140000 who didn't vote for it?

Democracy huh? It's a bitch.
I suppose I'd be more sympathetic if the Cornish Brexit vote wasn't some 12+ points ahead of its Remain vote - but it was, so frankly, I'm not.

As for all this stuff about it being the Tories' fault we had the Brexit referendum, that's quite true, I do concede. But seriously, it was coming to a head regardless; whether it's right, wrong or simply the imagined grievances of our 'marvelous'† Fleet Street journalists, the day of reckoning was coming anyway. Just like it is for much of Northern Europe, and the Euro itself; IMO the Tories just hastened the inevitable by a couple of years, that's all.

I'm still waiting for an acknowledgement of Labour's catastrophic failures in office, even 'just' the big ones i.e. their lack of banking regulation

Come on, man. I've never voted labour a day in my life, I'm anything but an apologist. I'd suggest that I am most likely to be the forum's best informed person (dubious honour though that is) on financial regulatory matters, however. There is no such thing as a UK financial regulatory environment. There hasn't been a UK financial regulatory environment since the eighties. Every single piece of regulation is agreed by every regulator. The reasons for this should be obvious - the minute one place becomes overly onerous to operate in, banks will shift operations elsewhere. That's why we never ended up with the 'Robin Hood Tax', or similar. The UK makes too much from the City to enforce any punishing level of regulation, and most other countries are in the same boat.

So what you have is effectively a cartel. A global group of banks, and a global group of regulators. Now the regulators do a decent job of tightening up the rules - Basel3 is a great example of something done post-crash to greatly improve the survivability of financial institutions by enforcing higher capital reserves - but everything they do is agreement by committee. If the UK wants to triple capital reserves and the US doesn't, it flat out doesn't happen.

So the light-touch banking regulation absolutely cannot be put at New Labour's door. It just can't. Literally the only thing they could have done is stood up, said 'fuck banking', implemented entirely their own UK-specific regulatory environment, and gutted the country's economy overnight.

Now, how the crisis was handled, you can absolutely blame Labour for, if you like. The response to it was entirely within their own control. Should they have bailed out the banks? I say yes, but of course that's motivated in no small measure by self-interest. Even without self-interest, of course, you're talking about a huge number of jobs and a massive impact to customers if the businesses go under. A lot of the choices that were made were excellent ones - the Special Liquidity scheme, as well as underwriting the FSCS to make sure that customers didn't lose their money when the banks did. There's plenty of arguments to be made on both sides there, of course.