Tomas Hirst

Not enough Club World Cup bantz huh? Looking for more of those sweet pre-season k̶n̶o̶c̶k̶a̶b̶o̶u̶t̶ friendly takes here?

isn't the solve for the question at the top precisely this? The event sequence of the last decade+ has very heavily selected in favour of slimeballs, so that in the end, you're left with true believers and people who will say anything - with no visible distinction between them from the outside

Banter option is England bat to a draw tomorrow

Surely they’ll try for a result tonight

Do not like! Run rate creeping down. Looks like it will be a slow bleed to the target (providing we get there!)

Smith can bat for sure but may need an atypically patient innings here. Not quite close enough for swinging the bat.

Not much batting in the tail here. Proper squeaky bum time.

No Joe!!!

What I thought too. Excellent.

How many reviews do India have left?

5 wickets down 😱

Don’t say it!!!

Roooooooooooot 💯

Rooooooooot

Harry dammit 🤬

The cricket! *nerves shredded*

Charlatan’s gonna charlatan

The curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the greatest RPG ever made How the success of a singular video game led to crises for almost all its creators

Not a gamer but really enjoyed this - a vivid piece of writing that perfectly captures concepts and personalities on.ft.com/45tSZiV

Fixing the housing problem requires thinking about the multiple roles we use property for as a society

It’s…a diversified portfolio of stocks and bonds rebalanced to the risk tolerance/holding period of the people in question.

Downstream of this will hopefully be more investment in a broader pool of financial assets - offering people more portfolio diversification & the economy more demand for (hopefully) productive investment opportunities. Higher utilisation of existing housing capacity & less of an owning/renting wedge

Reforms of capital gains and inheritance tax on primary properties also likely a part of the mix - reducing the incentive to over-save in property as a tax advantaged asset class. Make housing a boring question of shelter demand!

Exactly this. Having spent the past 3 years renting in Boston, competition between “luxury apartment” providers is a real thing - on both cost, amenities and residential services.

It was also just…the economics were extremely favourable. You could buy property levered against potential rental income, cost of debt service was well below rental yield and once paid off you effectively had a free asset.

And (whisper it) it might not be terrible to have more larger scale corporate landlords and fewer small scale BTL landlords because the economics of the latter are not great. Ultimately we want to remove fee layers (free riding managing agents) and have much more competition on service quality.

Still need to add significantly more supply, so you need developers to have a route to profit for delivering housing stock. That means a property price crash is unhelpful. But can get adjustment in affordability via prices increasing less than inflation (providing incomes are rising in real terms).

Can you stop people from treating property as a type of Giffen good and max leveraging themselves up to buy it? A reasonable, recurring property tax should help there. And also hopefully improve allocation as it encourages downsizing, particularly into retirement.

One thing it certainly involves is providing people with better financial advice! Property has been a terrible investment for at least the past 15 years in real terms. There’s a money illusion problem because prices went up, but there’s still a big opportunity cost.

There are no “this one trick will fix everything” policy moves - but have to shift both the personal and the political incentives to plough money into an economically unproductive asset class. That requires treating property wealth the same as other forms of wealth, and encouraging better allocation

Fixing the housing problem requires thinking about the multiple roles we use property for as a society