Do houses prices really only ever go up? Ask the Government

Plenty of otherwise sensible people have bought overpriced property on the assumption that prices could only go up. Funnily enough, the Government based its financing of the Olympic site in Stratford on the same premise.

Here at MoneyWeek, our main reaction to the house price slowdown has been why did it take so long?

The market has been clearly overpriced for a very long time. Yet people kept buying, and kept pushing prices even higher. Now, sure, a lot of that had to do with the free and easy availability of credit but even so, people have to take responsibility for their own financial decisions. No one forced anyone to take out a mortgage at six times their salary.

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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.