Housing Crisis

I splurge and buy a 50mm lens with a f/1.4 meaning faster shots and good for limited light. The lens is pretty close to how we see the real world - pictured. I miss my Pentax SuperME but the dark-room is just too time-consuming. At some point I will scan my black & whites and maybe put them up here.

A glum report by Morgan Stanley predicts that 1.2-million UK households face home values less than the mortgage or £165-billion of negative equity. The danger surrounds those who took out recent mortgages for houses at at sky-high prices (the mortgage-to-income ratio has shifted from 1.9X when we arrived in '97 to over 4X today). In many cases buyers took on loans for up to 125% of their property's value and already see red in now's decline. Morgan Stanley predicts prices to fall 10% this year and 5% next year, though the bank says this forecast could be optimistic, warning a correction could exceed 25%. Around half of all UK mortgage lending for house purchases since 2006 has involved deposits of 20% or less representing £77-billion of high-risk borrowing, according to The Daily Mail. Many put no deposit down at all. For those who need to sell their home because they can no longer afford the mortgage, negative equity is scary shit.