Archive for February, 2010
Market Updates Feb 20, 2010
New property rules
Government steps up moves to cool the sizzling property market yesterday.
First, anyone who sells a property within a year of buying it will have to pay stamp duty of around 3 per cent. This is on top of the stamp duty you had to pay on the purchase.
Second, lending institutions will now be allowed to lend only up to 80 per cent of the purchase price, not 90 per cent. Buyers will have to come up with at least 20 per cent themselves. Housing Board loans are not affected by this change in what is called the loan-to-value (LTV) limit.
The sellers’ stamp duty will hit short-term speculators, observers said, while the change in the bank loan limit is likely to weed out marginalised buyers. The measures will affect only a limited number of buyers but experts feel they could have a psychological effect on the market. There is also concern that tougher steps are in the pipeline.
The Whole Issue with Greece (Advance)
Greece and her budget problems has been in the news for some time now. The issued started way back in 1999.
Greece, which had an increasing budget deficit (where spending is higher than income) that cause it to fail the criteria for joining the single European currency in 1999, joined the euro in 2001. Member nations must keep deficits at less than 3 percent of GDP and trim national debt to less than 60 percent of GDP under the pact.
I’m going to be an Affluencer.
Parsing the Language of Influence and Affluence
Posted by Lewis Schiff in The Affluentialist
I recently read an article in The New York Times about an up-and-coming media mogul who claims to have coined the word “affluencer” which means: someone who tries to influence the affluent. In her role as the chief of NBC’s Bravo network, Lauren Zalaznick creates programming that will influence affluent people—in particular, her network’s target demographic of 18 to 49 urbanites.
