Shaking Up The Property Market

In our self regarding way we regard the high rolling London property market as the only one in the game.  Around the world there are other hot spots where prices are going well beyond the capability of many locals to pay.

One is in San Francisco where local employment effects have produced another internet boom in housing that the link describes.  What the long term effect might be is not known but history suggests a messy situation developing.

The city, however, has had difficult times in its past history of one kind or another.  As the boom unfolds it is worth recalling how a past rapid expansion came to a sudden end and the causes.

This time the reason was not human error beyond that of actually building a major city there but an entirely natural cause that brought things to a sudden halt in 1906.  London is thought to be relatively free of such things but this is not the case.

Recently it was realised that the ground water in the London Basin which had long been depleted was rising as a result of the departure of a great deal of industry etc.  Steps were taken and it is now said to be under control.

But if we have a couple of years of very heavy rain who can tell what might happen, notably if weather conditions produce a degree of flooding as well.  We have had enough plagues and quite a number of fires in the past so perhaps it is time for this form of disaster.

The Californians can always pray of course.  The saint in question ought to be Saint Andrew, see Wikipedia and all the other sites.  But this hope for divine intervention has form, as they say.  He is said to be Greek and of Constantinople.  His cross is pictured above.

Perhaps it might be more appropriate to use the proper name instead of the English version, that is San Andreas.  None the less Greece in the present day has both seismic and financial issues to worry about.

So might Istanbul, formerly Constantinople. which is at one end of the North Anatolian Fault, a notoriously unstable  major fault line reaching from the Red Sea to the Balkans, another troubled part of the world.

There is another territory, it has slipped the memory that adheres to San Andreas, or St. Andrew, that hopes for an independence financially based on multi-frequency trading, derivative packaging, financial mathematical algorithms and the manipulation of energy pricing which will trigger a property boom in its capital city.

Seismically, it is normally quiet, but adjacent to an area of high volcanic sensitivity.  In 1783 it was covered in a layer of ash and in both the late 17th Century and after the Mount Tambora blow of 1815 suffered almost Ice Age conditions.

Must go, it is time for the weather forecast.