London

Authored by Douglas Murray via The Gatestone Institute,

Authored by Stewart Dougherty via InvestmentResearchDynamics.com,

Asking prices for houses in the UK are starting to fall at a time when first time buyers in the UK continue to struggle to get on the ladder.

The average house price in the UK has now moved lower by around £25k according to property website Zoopla, but are still nearly 8 times the average wage, which is around 30K per year.

If you google “London moats”, you’ll probably alight on a link which will take you to “London’s Top 10 Moats: A Spotter’s Guide”. We had no idea there were so many and could only think of the “obvious” one surrounding the Tower of London, even if it’s waterless these days. According to the guide, a defensive ditch has surrounded the Tower since its origins in the eleventh century. The moat, which contained water from the thirteenth century until the 1840s, helps to protect the roughly cuboid “White Tower” keep, which gives the Tower of London its name.

In the run-up to the recent agreement on phase I of Brexit, there was mixed news on the extent to which jobs in the City of London would be relocated to other European hubs, primarily Frankfurt. On one hand, we discussed the meeting between US Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, and executives of JPM, Goldman, HSBC and other banks at Wilton’s restaurant during his trip to London in early November. The banks warned that they were close to a “point of no return” on moving jobs.