Friday, February 22, 2008

Guido Fawkes: Another Rubbish Graph and Analysis


Guido has published a classic "look mum no brains" graph which makes little sense. The figures are real enough but highly selective and with insufficient data for worthwhile analysis. Even for his own worthless analysis. GuF claims that Northern Rock actually has the worst mortgage book in the business.

This spurious conclusion is based on a comparison of absolute number of delinquent mortgages with four other lenders - but not Nationwide, or Halifax, or A&L, or AIB, or even RBS/Nat West.

Under water-boarding torture the GuFster has admitted in comments that rather than gathering the data himself as he implies he nicked it from a comment at Housepricecrash.co.uk.

These mysterious folk are predicting a house price crash literally TEN TIMES the quantum of the average change for the blue chip predictors. And the latter have the change going upward.

Blue chip and LOL say: 3.5% growth. HPC and GuF say: 35% crash. Now it is speculation but I would guess that the people behind this site and GuF himself are betting on a crash and stand to gain handsomely if there is one. Guido will no doubt deny this vehemently if it is not true.

UPDATE: Guido has added a proper hat tip, shock. Looks like GuF has not only bottled the scrap with Manic but also turned over a new leaf as an honest broker. Credit where credit's due as it were.

2 comments:

Newmania said...

I would be fairly suprised if Northern Rock did not have the worst book in the business though because it had the most aggressive products
Had it been a good company I wouldn't have had to own it . QED...I own a crock of shit.Hardly a controversy that is why Nationalisation is a grim portent even if it was the only option

Chris Paul said...

Guido is of course absolutely wrong about the loan book. His graph is propaganda and he knows it. Not like with like at all. And not proportional to e.g. number of mortgages issued. This is typical of the man.

The strength of the loan book wasn't the problem. It was the strength of the putative lenders that NR's desperately greedy capitalist management were foolishly relying on that went wrong.