Trying to spin doctor the economy doesn't work

Property pundits, PR people, estate agents and the government - they're all trying to convince us that there is no house price bubble. But their attempts to massage reality are in vain.

Property pundits in the UK seem a little more sophisticated than in the US. In the States, everyone from house builders to estate agents are, frankly, panicking. There's no pretence of everything being OK - there's talk of the worst slump in decades, markets in freefall - it's bad out there and they know it.

But here in the UK, the pundits know how to play it. When the Bank of England raised interest rates, the tone of housing reports changed suddenly from declaring the return of the mini-boom', to warning of a slowdown and declarations that "no further rate hikes are needed."

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.