Gordon Brown and Housing

Gordon Brown was interviewed on the BBC this morning prior to addressing both houses of congress in the US.

The thorny question of blame came up as you would expect, especially given Chancellor Alistair Darlings comments about "collective responsibility" and "humility". What did we hear from our Prime Minister "the whole global financial system seized up" (see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7922426.stm).

While this is true, it still avoids the underlying question of why the Global Financial System seized up, and that brings us back to the overheated housing market, in some senses a peculiarly British problem. It is like saying after a car accident that "there was a car accident" and avoiding the reasons why there was an accident, just blindly repeating that there was an accident.

I repeat, until we accept that the overheating housing market was a major cause of our current financial problems we are just waiting to restart the bubble.