Prime on

As is often the way in this country, we pick up a wheeze from over the pond some time after those over the pond have tired of it. In this case, now that we are perhaps, in this country at least, emerging from the mess triggered by the sub-prime fiasco in the US, we appear to be going for a sub-prime fiasco of our own by providing government money to underwrite housing loans to people who can't really afford them.

The Guardian describes this as a £130 billion bung to the housing finance industry, which seems a bit OTT, it not being at all clear to me exactly how underwriting dodgy housing loans gets turned in government expenditure, although it clearly does in one way or another. But, in any event, the government expenditure looks to be substantial.

So, if such monies are available, why not just chuck it at the social housing sector? Pay them to build houses rather than paying the finance industry to build loans? I suppose the trouble is that paying to build houses sounds much to much like a nationalised industry and is therefore bad. Paying to build loans is just helping out our friends in the financial services industry and is therefore good.

Further annoyed by remembering reading a short book about a stint in the world of gangs by a middle aged and middle class lady, the relevance here being that one conclusion that I took away from it was that the provision of decent housing for young people, along the lines of university accommodation, accommodation which comes with a degree of support and supervision, might be a good thing. But I cannot trace the thing now - even going so far as to ask Amazon from whom I probably bought the book. Sadly they only keep customer visible records for the past year or so - but quite enough to be quite shocked to see how much stuff I buy from them.

Pressing on, I finally solve the search problem. I ask Google for the book and he comes up more or less instantly with 'Among the Hoods'. I ask my blog for hoods and it comes up with 12th November 2012. So, as ever, I failed because I had failed to light upon the search term which produced a short list containing the right answer. Interestingly, using the Windows 8 search facility of my file copy of the blog was hopeless because that has a file for each month, and pretty much every month contained the search terms I was using: a month is too big a unit for searching to work well. But armed with hoods, I tried it with 'hood', which again seemed to return pretty much every month. Tried it with 'hoods' and got the search results down to three months, the first one being the right one. Google are clearly doing a very good job at the search game.