Great investment opportunities exist even in the present gloomy economic climate. Railway electrification leads to land value growth and a new programme was announced during the summer. We have been looking at the proposals and identified the likely property hotspots.

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Network Rail has now published its Strategic Business Case for New Lines. The product of a study by transport consultants Steer Davies Gleave, it concludes that a new core line from London to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Glasgow would cost £34 billion to build and, over a 60 year period, generate £23 billion of additional revenue and a further £34 billion in additional benefits. So should it happen, and if so, how and when?

Private equity company Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman said on Tuesday that up to 45 percent of the world's wealth has been destroyed by the global credit crisis. "Between 40 and 45 percent of the world's wealth has been destroyed in little less than a year and a half," Schwarzman told an audience at the Japan Society. "This is absolutely unprecedented in our lifetime." But the U.S. government is committed to the preservation of financial institutions, he said, and will do whatever it takes to restart the economy.

Piffle! That is a couple of continents gone!

How is this supposed to have happened? The planet has not suffered an asteroid strike, or other global natural catastrophe. There has not been a world war. No tsunami occurred, devastating the more populous areas of Japan or the USA. What destruction has occurred? What Schwarzman means is that people will not pay as much as they would have done in 2007 for titles of ownership of shares and other assets - pieces of paper of no intrinsic worth apart from the fact that they are recognised as claims on real wealth, primarily the stream of revenue that can be identified as economic rent of land.

Pieces of paper are not wealth. Land is not wealth. The people who play this game are not wealth-creators but participants in a casino game parasitic on the economic organism. The sooner everyone understands this, the sooner they will be cured of the delusion that money can be made by moving it around.

Article in International Herald Tribune

EMPLOYERS' BURDEN OF TAX

This diagram illustrates the shocking truth about how the burden of taxation really falls on employers, despite appearances to the contrary.

The Turner Review - a regulatory response to the banking crisis - has just been published. It is a highly technical and densely written 120 page analysis which needs to be gone through carefully. Anyone lacking the necessary background knowledge will be unable to grasp much of the detail.

All we can say about it is to point out yet again that the primary cause was a credit-fuelled land price bubble. These will always happen unless that is addressed, for example, by land value taxation - collection of the annual rental value of land for use as the principal source of public revenue. Such boom-busts based on land speculation with borrowed money have been occuring since the beginning of capitalism around 1800, at intervals of about 18 years. Which is just long enough for the defence mechanisms to be dismantled before the disasters occur.

A very long term view must be taken.