Old-fashioned mortgages

I am beginning to feel some nostalgia for the old-fashioned mortgage. I’m sure that some readers of this blog must remember what it was like borrowing money to buy a roof over your head in the old days. The old days? I mean a quarter of a century ago,  which is when I bought my first flat, overlooking the main railway line just north of Euston. Jolly nice it was too; but jolly noisy.

Anyway, the old system went something like this. First of all, you had to show you were a ‘regular saver’.  That usually meant picking a Building Society some years before you thought you would ever want to buy a house, and paying 50 quid or so into a savings account. Unless your Mum and Dad were going to help out, you’d need to do that anyway, because 100% mortgages were quite unheard of. If you were very lucky, you might get 90% -- so my £27,500 flat needed £2750 from my own little nest egg of savings.

Then there was the basic rule of thumb that you could have two and a half times your annual salary, which JUST about worked for me. But more than that there was the scary interview . . . all about financial responsibility and being part of a mutual building society. Patronising and paternalistic it may have been. But this was not a questions of banks and shareholders and profits; this was about membership, and the symbiosis of investors and borrowers.

So I had a quick check on the Halifax’s mortgage calculator website, to discover that the rule of thumb was now FIVE times your annual salary.

I tried entering my own annual earnings – substantial by many standards, even if university teachers as a group are still woefully underpaid – to see what I would have to pay each month, if I took the maximum. Suffice it to say that after I had paid the utility bills, the council tax, the food and (OK. . .I COULD do without it ) the car, there wouldn’t be  much left. Holidays would be the very cheapest, clothes-buying would be a rare event (not much different from now, you might say), and heaven knows how the central heating boiler or washing machine would be replaced.

True, it wouldn’t exactly be the breadline, but then I’m lucky and earn a lot more than the national average. Try it on half the money.

The objection to my nostalgia is that things (ie house prices) have changed since the late 70s. The average house price in Cambridge is now £300,000 – which means that on the ‘five times’ calculation a newly arrived professor at the bottom of the professorial pay-scale (and I mean professor, not junior lecturer) could just about afford it, if they took the maximum mortgage. Junior lecturer, nurse, shop assistant, not a hope. And on a two and a half times mortage, you must be joking.

So what is the option? Honestly I haven’t a clue. But I can’t help thinking that some kind of effort to turn the clock back might be a good idea.

Meanwhile though, I have rather less sympathy than Brown and Darling seem to have with those coming off fixed rate mortgages and finding they have a big rise in their payments. Not that I wish repossession on anyone. But with a fixed rate you always reckoned it probably saved you money for the fixed term, on the understanding that it might well go up after that. The more you saved, the nastier the shock at the end. Wasn’t that the point of it?

As for the banks, can anyone explain to me how they have gone from 'record profits' to needing a government bale-out in lass than a year?

Comments

[PETER WOOD]

I have only just caught up with Mary Beard's back-of-Euston account of olde-worlde mortgage transactions. Not appreciating that, according to Philip Squire, "the mortgage problem is so deeply rooted in our general world-historical situation", I can only offer up in sacrifice Mr Smetherwick circa 1959-60 who sat in the Abbey office in Newcastle. When I went to see this august creature he could just be seen at his enormous desk at the end of a very long room. Like little Erich Honecker, the diminutive Staatsratvorsitzender of the GDR, in his Palast der Republik, his very smallness was intimidating. Smetherwick said Abbey wanted evidence of T-H-RRRRRRR-I-F-T.
The word was trilled out in a frightening way - frightening if you were young and green about finance. I don't know about the world-historical situation but it sees to me that all these finance and banking people at that time loved - even relished -their little bit of power over others. That was also the situation I found in the GDR a decade later.

[Deirdre]

Well, Richard, obviously I hope that such a dispiriting choice will not become necessary. At the same time, I tend to agree with the points made by Philip Squire about the need for changes to be made in order for the planet to survive.

I agree one shouldn't give up hope, but I believe that science rather than ideology will supply (if anything will) the improvements on which the planet depends, as Philip Squire notes, to survive.

[Richard]

The question is, given the everywhere apparent and indisputable variation and flexibility in the way in which societies are organised, and the boundless possibilities of human ingenuity, why should you feel confined into such a dispiriting choice?

"You have nothing to lose but your chains" was, as Deirdre implies, always a lie or anyway a great simplification: almost everybody has something to lose (friends, relatives, life; and in the Soviet experiment, quite a few lost these).

But the determination to believe in a better way and to try to find what it is shouldn't be given up for that reason...

All best,
Richard

[Deirdre]

Personally, I would choose getting enough to eat and being a semi-oppressed worker paying rent in a less than perfect house, over starving in an environment working towards a more perfect ideology.

[Philip Squire]

Without wishing to express a view as to the relative merits of different systems of economic organisation, the principal difficulty inherent in the UK's current position is that we have no option that we are prepared to choose, save to continue on the same path. Our economy is not in crisis or anything like it: despite the manner of reporting, the OECD's downgrading of our growth projection still leaves us top of the developed nations. The problem is that the strength of the economy relies on the huge quantities of consumer spending sloshing about. This comes either from credit or from salaries which bear no relation to productive output. Neither is a sustainable source of support, but the alternative is too dreadful to contemplate.
What we really need - for inequality to stop growing, for the planet to survive - is an impossible and ghastly prescription of temporary de-globalisation, house price collapse, increase in manufacture (even down to the level of growing veg and cooking at home), decrease in consumption, greater equality of income. 'taint gonna happen.
Meanwhile, would people please recognise that warring over the ownership of what little housing stock we own, and how it should be allocated is addressing the wrong problem. The issue of price is important because rising prices provide consumer spending. (Query, whether we can do without it.) But the starting point is supply. If England (and I mean just England) was prepared to build on the genuinely huge amounts of empty land the problem would begin to ease. I say with complete neutrality that this will not happen as that land is owned by those who know how to hang on to it, supported by oddly myopic green lobbyists. Faced with a choice between building enough homes for us to be able to afford and live in sustainably, with the subsidiary advantage of that being a process through which community-cohesion grows (see Jonathan Sacks), or preserving more bucolic farmland than there are eyes enough to behold, surely the builders have it..

[Xjy]

Since the Kulaks have been brought up, the reason why they were not kept down in the first place was quite ironic. It was the boneheaded policy of Stalin and Bukharin in opposition to Trotsky and Zinoviev, pursued more for reasons of winning the party do-nothing bureaucrats (as Bukharin soon learnt to his cost) than of advancing the country or agriculture. The policy was a grotesque misiinterpretation of the emergency New Economic Policy of the immediate post-intervention/civil war period. After Lenin's death, Trotsky soon outlined a policy of massive modernization and industrialization. Stalin got Bukharin to launch a massive grabfest for the rich peasants under the pretext of "advancing to socialism at a snail's pace". So from being under the thumb of the poor peasants and rural landless in the rural soviets, the Kulaks made hay while the sun shone, so to speak, and their clout grew explosively. In his trademark fashion Stalin turned on a kopek, dumped Bukharin and, having sidelined Trotsky, stole his industrialization ideas and botched them up with brutal compulsion at the end of a bayonet.Mind you, not many people were sorry to see the Kulaks get their come-uppance.

So Stalinism can take the credit for creating the Kulak problem in the first place, thanks to a brain-dead attempt to solve the supply problem by buttering ;-) up the richest peasants. And Stalinism can take the credit for not just liquidating the Kulaks as a class (needn't involve any bloodshed, just removing the socio-political life support unit allowing them to extract obscene profits from supply shortages and starving workers) but also exterminating many of them physically. The real tragedy is the toll taken on the rural population in general by the too much too late industrialization drive.

Anyway, Stalinism is not an automatic consequence of socialism, even in its revolutionary Bolshevik form. It can be avoided by democratic methods of decision-making in society in general and in the workers' movement in particular.

Which is why nationalizing the land (removing the whopping monopoly tax exacted in the form of rent) and the housing stock (removing a ditto tax on shelter), and throwing a sop or two to the dogs used to crumbs from the bourgeoisie's table, in our industrialized imperialist and petty imperialist countries, will probably happen with remarkable ease.

Just as capitalism has different regimes, from slave-owning racism to the surprisingly democratic to the viciously fascistic, so will socialism. Only the totalitarian crises of socialism reverse the historical order of capitalism. Capitalism has proceeded from more and more to less and less democratic as it sees its end approaching. But the death agony of capitalism means that while it still rules the world it will flail viciously at its enemies (both states and people), and sometimes provoke the kind of dysfunctional regime that ran the Soviet Union under the Stalinist bureaucracy. However, as capitalism weakens and finally withers away, the need for dictatorial crisis measures will decrease and socialism will be able to make a clearer and clearer case for most people that Stalinism was in fact the aberration some of us have always maintained.

So since the mortgage problem is so deeply rooted in our general world-historical situation, involving strategic issues of ownership and control of land and housing on a world scale, it's no wonder there are no solutions on hand in the confines of one country (Britain) and one class (the wannabe property owners but actual debt-slaves).

Tough one, amici!

[Paul Potts]

Deirdre

You mention Robert Mugabe, and since I have something to say about that, and since Mary has mentoned Zimbabwe elswhere on this website, I shall try.

Barely 150 years ago, the land of the people was ripped off them by the whites - Cecil Rhodes et al - hence "Rhodesia". With the Ndebele {Matabele} they had to fight hard, but the Shona gave in easily, since they knew perfectly well that you can't "buy" land since it doesn't "belong" to anyone in the first place - to the ancestors maybe, administered not by bts of paper, but by their reputed descendents, though the "Chiefs".

Now it gets a bit more complicated. South African and British politics get involved. There were two wings of the South African liberation movement - the ANC (African National Congress) - which had s soft Marxist background going back to Albert Luthuli and Gandhi, and was by instinct pacifist. The Russians supported them in Zambia and elsewhere. But there was the oher lot - the PAC (Pan African Congress) - founded by Robert Sobukwe in the 1960's, who were impatient, and saw the conflict in racial rather than social terms. I once had the dubious pleasure of trying to teach his son to learn English, well, whyever should he? This led to the famous Sharpeville riots and massacre in 1967 (I think)
and the establishment of the PAC as a force to be reckoned with. Their slogan was "drive the settlers into the sea". But note the wording: "settlers", not "whites". If you are white but not a settler, and look them in the eyes, they fall in love with you immediately, beieve me. Black racism in Africa it quite diffenet form the white crudity The PAC's objective was to get the land back - the land occupied by the Dutch rather than the English after the "Great Trek" of 1830 something, when the Brits tried to put a stop to slavery in their Empire.

Robert Mugabe was PAC, not ANC. His movement was supported by the Chinese, even the North Koreans, not the Russians - and of course the Catholic Church. His ambition was to get the land back. For the Africans. In this, he was frustrated at the famous Lancaster house neotiations in the early days of Thatcher by Smora Machel, the recently new (Marxisist)President of Mozambique - "don't mess it up was his message, and Lord Carrington et al knew what they were doing. Incidentally, one reason why previous Labour governments could not resolve this problem is because the Tories made it impossible - when Harold Wilson considered sending troops into Rhodesia, he was faced with the threat of an army mutiny (Cv "The Curragh^ - 1915 or so)

Relations between South Africa and Zimbabwe were frosty for a decade as a a result of the ideological divide I have tried to describe - the ANC/PAC issue still rankles. But, and this is what I realy want to say, in Africa, it is the land that matters, not the economy, stupid. History matters here, not the economy. "Sacrifice this generation to the next" = I know these were Stalin's words not Mugabe's, but if anything is to be done, some understanding is required on the part of the would-be intervenionists.

And, oddly enough, the thinking of President Mbekhi in South Africa is more PAC than ANC, which is one reason wh he does'nt screw Mugabe. He also wants to get the land back, ut has learned caution.

[Xjy]

In our epoch great numbers of people can swallow the centralized state mobilization of billions of dollars worth of machines, other resources and labour purely to kill and enslave whole peoples (US foreign policy, and that of other imperialist nations, notably Britain and France). Hook, line and sinker. But they strain at any attempt to mobilize machines, resources and labour for constructive ends. Deirdre is a good example of this.
"Kulak" means "fist" in Russian. These were rich peasants, local squires, vicious exploiters of poor rural workers and experts at turning poorer peasants into landless semi-slaves. Nothing to weep over there. Nor the slave- (serf-)owning aristocracy or the Tsars who kept them in their place. Boo-fucking- hoo, as far as I'm concerned.

Apart from that, I forgot the most important measure of all as far as the "floating voters", the "better off" professionals, the property "owners" (ha-ha) and all the rest of the ratracers are concerned.

Cancellation of all debts owed by private individuals to financial institutions. The mortgage problem solved at one fell swoop, and the loud mouths of the baying petty-bourgeoisie stuffed with gold at the expense of the bloated big bourgeoisie. Not exactly gold, of course, just the endless usury lifted off their backs, the end of debt slavery. For which they should be as grateful as any Indian indentured labourer (fat chance of gratitude of course, but it would give them a vested interest in the new system - they get secure tenure of their house, and get to spend their money on food and clothes and other goodies).

But of course it will take a lot of social and political earthquakes before this programme could be realized. Perhaps not quite as many as you might think though. The wicked Chavez is already selling cheap oil to poor US communities and London Town, for instance. And swapping oil for medical and teaching assistance from Cuba. The treacherous monster!!

How true it is that we row our societal galley into the future facing back to the past... Gunnar Ekelöf has a great poem about this - Samothrake (today's Classical reference!!).

Hasta la victoria siempre!

[Tony Francis]

Dear OPN, In re Bracton: he is buried in front of Bracton's altar at Exeter Cathedral:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/02726c.htm
Bracton, whose name was really Bratton, probably originally named Bradton ("Broad Town"), is not listed a being a Bishop at Exeter, although he was a Chancellor:
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05708a.htm
On Google Earth there are some nice photos of Exeter Cathedral. There is an intriguing outdoor statue which is not identified on Google Earth. I was convinced this must be Bracton. But, it is Richard Hooker:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Hooker_%28theologian%29
http://www.exeter-cathedral.org.uk/Clergy/Hooker.html

[Tony Francis]

Deidre: Kulak extermination, straight nationalizaion or class warfare? Both:
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulaks
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collectivization_in_the_USSR
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Involuntary_settlements_in_the_Soviet_Union

[Deirdre]

XJY, your views are amusingly retro!
Nationalising the land has been tried in other countries and led to disaster.
In dear old Britain, it was considered by Labour governments of the 1960's but never taken any further.
Tony, I don't have time, but could you provide us with the detail of what the land program was that led to the extermination of the Kulaks in USSR in the 1930's? Was it straight nationalisation or simple class warfare?
Vasily Grossman wrote a wonderful novel about the death of the peasant middle class and how socialism kills.
Then there's Robert Mugabe, who has brought a once-wealthy and fertile land to the verge of extinction by his land policies.

[Tony Francis]

http://www.brookesnews.com/062703useconomykeynes.html

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subprime_mortgage_crisis

http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_General_Theory_of_Employment%2C_Interest%2C_and_Money

[Xjy]

Poor Annette L - how would "property chute" do you?

In the really old days, there was a ditty:

Love is a flower that withers and dies;
Love is like a rose.
But property - property sticks,
And property - property grows!

Since I moved to Sweden, two things about Britain have made me shrink away from going back - the impossibility of getting a decent job (might be a bit better now), and particularly the impossibility of finding somewhere to live (unless I bunked up with friends somewhere). And as time and the Thatcher-Blair epoch just drags on and on, it all gets worse. So if there's a "brain" drain, our despicable leaders pulled the plug.

As for who screws who, it's the economy, dumbass. That is, the system - capitalism. As long as you accept that, you accept that people will suffer and die, while capital is coddled, nurtured, and housed in splendour. As fewer and fewer people have access to capital worth anything, more and more capitalists become ex-capitalists, ie just people, and get screwed along with the rest of us. And you have bellum omnium contra omnes. (Big) dog eats (little) dog. Little fleas have bigger fleas, Upon their backs to bite 'em. And these have even bigger fleas, And so ad infinitum.

What we can do about it, is get together and agree to nationalize the land and the building stock. Tenure for owners of one or two dwellings, any more impounded. Nationalize the construction industry, and the infrastructure and raw material sectors, and build like billy-o, till our needs are secured,and we can help people in countries needing it more than us.

The welfare state, council housing and all that were just an expensive experiment headed by liberals and social-democrats to head off threatening revolution. As the threat of revolution subsided, and the working class seemed subdued and even smashed (Thatcher again, think the miners' strike), capital started hauling back in every little concession it had made to working class (and petty-bourgeois) living conditions and "prosperity". From "You've never had it so good!" to "We shall exterminate you!" in two or three short decades.

[don]

There has been a large drop in interests rates in the last 20 years. When I bought my house in the U.S. in 1991, my first 30 year mortgage was at 9 1/2 percent. When interests rates are higher, home prices can tend to be lower. As interests rates decline, the price of houses may rise. However, you must compare all these factors when you compare what people are paying now and paying then. The other factor is the price of rents. Many people find that they are paying rents very near the price they might pay for a house. In other words, if rents are high people may well consider buying. Finally, you must compare the overall cost of living then and now to see if housing payments are more or less comparable. In the U.S., as well, there have been in the past accusations of being much too stringent in loans to the less well off leading to many people championing the riskier loans. Of course, you must also compare the appreciation of housing prices verses cds, bonds, stock, etc., to see if the investment in a house, however onerous, will pay off more in the long run. Given the S & L bailout in the 1990's in the U.S., I would imagine that banks have concluded that the government will not let them fail. In other words, they can take far riskier chances knowing they will be helped out in the end. As for personal saving, it would appear to many that taxes are a forced savings plan which should take care of them. After all, Social Security is a mandatory retirement plan.

[Tony Francis]

The present bank crisis can be traced to a financial instrument called the "mortgage backed security". In the old days, a bank or savings and loan would loan money to buy a house. Since the bank was personally responsible, they would give the potential buyer the "fisheye" to make sure they were a good risk. Part of that risk determination was showing the ability to save 20% of the price of the house. Slowly, this eroded to 10%, the 5%, and finally, nothing down. The loan was called an "asset backed security", meaning that if the buyer defaulted, there was an asset (the house) which could be reclaimed and resold. The mortgage backed security allowed the "bundling" of hundreds or thousands of loans, which were sold as a bond instrument. The theory was that if the risk was spread around the globe (eg. Japanese insurance companies, German banks, British bond market, etc) the risk would mitigate to zero. The local bank had no risk, therefore, they loaned money to anyone with a job, and then bundled the loan and sold it. Loans were made to a lot of people who would never had been given one in the old days. Banks around the world used these mortgage backed securities as part of their cash reserves. When a bank loans money, it has to keep about 20% in reserve as real assets. When mortgage backed securities started to fail, bank reserves were thrown into jeopardy. Central banks pumped money into these failing banks to prop up the system. Of course, this adds to the already existent inflationary pressures. Inflation is good for central governments: $10 trillion debt will reduce to about $1 trillion (in buying power)over 30 years. Rising real estate values increase tax revenues (eg a $60,000 house may produce $600 in taxes, which increases to $2,000 if the value of the house inflates to $200,000). The government has to do nothing to get more taxes. And wage inflation throws people into higher tax brackets. Too rapid inflation, as we have now causes political instability.
http://www.riskglossary.com/link/mortgage_backed_security.htm
http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mortgage-backed_security
"Mortgage" is a medieval word meaning "death pledge". Speaking of Wiki: another battle with editors! This one is not so bloody - just stupid. Details to follow. You won't believe it. I can't believe it.

[Lucy]

Wow, Annette! I wasn't thinking of blaming the Americans and certainly wouldn't dare to now. While you're right that the forbidden phrase implies greed, I think lots of people in England do see the issue in the same terms of independence from landlords that you describe. The various comments on greed and people failing to save money get a bit wearing, btw - there seems to be a view that all people of my generation (twenties) are spendthifts with no concept of work. I would *love* to have a job, but I can't get one. I have a degree from a good university, and I cannot get a job, even at the local supermarket. I do live in the North-East, which has the lowest employment rate in the country, but still, I worry hugely about the problem of paying the rent and would love to work, save like crazy, and buy a house. Here, prices go down to c. 60,000 - but that's still far out of reach on the average local income for people my age. I'm just hoping house prices continue to fall ... and in the mean time, please, could people refrain from assuming 'thrift' has disappeared, and that we feckless younglings are greedy for property for the sake of showing off?

[Richard]

To anon's two methods for affording to buy property in southern England should of course be added

3. Have rich and generous parents.

Anyway, some aspects of the "credit crunch" are surely desirable: bankers getting sacked is a healthy kind of amusement for the rest of us, and the reduction in silly bonuses etc. might eventually make housing more affordable.

Annette is quite right that we shouldn't blame Americans for our own choices. Blaming Thatcher, on the other hand, is a different matter. Personally, I blame her for bad weather ("Raining again" "Bloody Thatcher...").

Best,
Richard

[Deirdre]

Going back even further, to thirty years ago, the norm was then that no-one could afford to buy anything on their own at all. People paired up with someone else, usually a spouse, to buy their first "property". To have a place all one's own was an unimaginable luxury.
I also remember interest rates being 15%. I believe that the recent relaxation of standards required to obtain a mortgage (eg 5 times income) was only possible because interest rates went down to less than 4%. Anyone who got a fixed rate then was lucky, but should really have looked ahead to what would happen when it ended.

[Annette Laing]

Every time I visit the UK, someone within my earshot utters that repellent expression, "getting a foot on the property ladder." Interestingly, I have never heard that saying here in the U.S., nor anything of its like, where the emphasis in house-buying speak is on independence from landlords and rents, and so it reveals a great deal about contemporary British cultural attitudes. The implication that people should and must work to acquire more and larger "properties" (we used to call them houses and flats, didn't we?)is new, and it puts incredible stress on young Brits, who (if my friends and family are anything to go by) are starving themselves to pay the mortgages on flats that are considerably less salubrious than our lovely old council house in the Seventies. Now, of course, the entire culture that undergirded the "property" fiasco is being revealed for the delusion that it is. There is no property ladder: Only young people living in tiny crannies for which they have paid too much money. It's fear, its greed, and it's a society that has gone horribly wrong since my departure in the early 80s. Don't blame Thatcherism (amazing how the number of middle-aged Brits willing to admit supporting her rivals the proportion of elderly French who admit to approving of Vichy rule),and don't blame America (nobody is forcing Brits to imitate our sad example, and I'm fed up of hearing Brits project their own failures onto the Yanks.) Start looking in the mirror. Oh, and fair warning: The next person who says "property ladder" in front of me will get clobbered.

[RichardH]

I agree with Pratip Chatterjee but part of the problem lies with the policies of successive governments who have, by their tax regimes, made saving both difficult and, sadly, thoroughly unprofitable. We have thus been made much more dependent on the state - and, of course, easier to control!

[Anon]

So far I have worked out two methods for affording property whilst working as a junior academic in Cambridge:
1 - live several miles away and commute in some way (this is required if one even seeks to rent and have a decent return);

2 - rely upon one's partner to provide the majority of the income.

Neither are really desirable.

Of course part of this is self-inflicted - if one wishes to purchase property one must save for a deposit. To do so in a manner which will enable a purchase by around the age of 30 requires saving about a third of annual net salary.

As for the banks, I am not a specialist but: (i) various investments were profitable last year - these investments were bad investments (as some always are) and their value has now been deducted from banks' balances;
(ii) only 1 bank has had a bale out (Northern Rock). The remainder have benefited from additional funds being made available by central banks. There are two problems for banks:
(a) with the loss of value in some of their investments, this means they have proportionately less capital. As banks are obliged to have a set ratio of capital to lending, this obviously impacts upon their possibilities of lending. Lending, however, is also how banks make a profit;
(b) all banks are suffering this at the same time. All are worried about the value of any security they receive for loans. As such, they do not lend to each other, which means funds are not being transferred to where they are needed in the market. Those banks which do obtain money from others are paying higher interest rates on it. This is being passed on. The Bank of England is attempting to ensure banks can loan to each other with a reliable security.

I may have misunderstood, but that is my current understanding. Please do enlighten

[Michael Bulley]

The thumb is being used more now, what with mobile phones and texting. So the rule of thumb is bound to have increased.

As for the general economic situation, sacrifices are needed. I suggest sacrificing the richest 10% (official ceremonies in the main cities, with bonfires maybe) and redistributing their assets to the remaining 90% in inverse proportion to their wealth.

[pratip chatterjee]

The near disappearance of the concept of thrift in modern life must have something to do with the points raised by this excellent article. The old-fashioned ways might have been staid , but perhaps would be preferable to these complex modern practices which are underlined by factors such as "irrational exuberance" and "fear and greed". It is little wonder that no one is coming forward to answer the simple but powerful query that is posed in the concluding line of the article.