On 18 September, the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) reported that gross lending in August stood at an estimated £21.8 billion. It’s a 12% fall from July’s figures, but - perhaps surprisingly - ‘only’ 36% lower than last August.

36% is a big fall, but it’s not as big as you might expect. We’ve been hearing all about the credit crunch for over a year now, with a seemingly endless flow of bad news telling us that credit’s getting harder and harder to get. Even after all this bad news, lending is still at two-thirds the level we saw back in August 2007, before the troubles in the mortgage market really kicked off.

Mortgages, of course, are the key to home ownership for most people. Very few of us can afford a house outright, so finding a mortgage is essential. As long as mortgages are relatively hard to get, there’s much less demand for properties, which goes a long way towards explaining the recent drops in house prices. If mortgage funding dried up completely, it’s safe to assume that prices would drop a lot faster: there would be so few potential buyers that many would-be sellers would be forced to accept lower offers.

But there’s no sign of that. The mortgage market may be going through hard times, but it’s still very much ‘in business’. After all, £21.8 billion is a lot of money - the 36% drop announced by the Council of Mortgage Lenders means that mortgage lending is still at 64% of the level it was at last year.

Why so high? For people with substantial deposits, finding a mortgage isn’t particularly difficult. Basically, mortgage providers have become a lot more ‘risk averse’ than they used to be - more nervous about lending to people whose credit ratings aren’t perfect, or who don’t have much money to put down. According to the Council for Mortgage Lenders: ‘The average first-time buyer had a deposit of 15% in July, up from 13% in June’.

This doesn’t mean that mortgages are only available to people with a flawless credit rating and plenty of cash in the bank. It does, however, underline the importance of talking to a specialist with the right contacts - and the right experience - to find a mortgage that’s right for the individual’s circumstances.

No-one really knows what’ll happen next in the mortgage market, but one thing’s clear. House prices depend heavily on the availability of mortgages - and that’s unlikely to improve until mortgage providers become more confident about lending the money they do have. In the words of Michael Coogan, Direct General of the Council of Mortgage Lenders: “Restoring the flow of funding to the mortgage market is crucial to helping the housing market recovery”.

Original article submitted by debt help specialist Think Money

Japan lit its candles of pure, “noble sadness” on the 60th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The mayor of the late city, Iccho Itoh, criticized the USA for dropping the first atomic bomb in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and following that after 3 days by the second atomic bomb which attacked Nagasaki.

The two bombs harvested the lives of more than
242,437 people to end the Second World War by the surrender of Japan.

Iccho Itoh, urged the United States to stop the recent new nuclear policy and made an angry appeal for a global ban on nuclear weapons.

He made gestures towards the International peace by asking if the United States security has enhanced by maintaining 10,000 nuclear weapons, and carrying out repeated sub-critical nuclear tests and pursuing the development of new mini-nuclear weapons!

I thought what he tries to convey, is a deep part of the “Bushing” new administration policy, to force out the “New American Time”. This new American time plays the first role in the “New World Order” after the break-down of the Socialist System and the Eastern Block.

The deep sorrow and sadness of the American people which we share in other parts of this World, in regards to the September 11th horror, plays a mobilized factor to determine the future of peace on this Earth nowadays.

That’s what makes the mayor of Nagasaki’s words about the 9-11 attacks more understandable when he said and aimed particularly at Washington: “We understand your anger and anxiety over the memories of the horror of the 9-11 terrorist attacks.”

But this result leaves an urgent question in the collective memory of those who do love peace: Is Bush’s Second Term! A Chance for More Wars or A Stable Peace?

If the sour feelings of the invasion of Iraq is still sour, then the answer will never come to be predictably “optimistic”!

Not the political powers, but the people who should really stop the crisis.

Khalid Osman is a teacher, a journalist, and a webmaster at
http://www.child-book-publishing-ezine.com and
http://www.child-book-publishing-ezine.com

In the words of a secret agent who has signed the Official Secrets Act in Britain we find the rationale for what government and supranational organizations have been involved in since Cleopatra, Christopher Marlowe and his own immediate predecessors Crowley and Ian Fleming. David Barrett tells us:

“Although the policies of ‘need-to-know’ and ‘compartmentalized knowledge’ can sometimes cause more trouble than they’re worth, there are very sensible reasons for them; there are many things which do require the highest levels of secrecy. If a careless word at an embassy cocktail party were to reveal how successful Britain was at intercepting and decrypting another country’s communications, a simple change of cypher equipment or cypher key generator could throwaway years of painstaking work at GCHQ. Another careless word could cause the life of a long-term, well-established British agent abroad to be threatened, or at the very to be bust open.

Lord George-Brown, a former Foreign Secretary (1966-68), raises a disturbing point about security, and the trustworthiness or otherwise of members of the security services and the Diplomatic Service - and, by extension, MPs and Ministers of State. If someone is under suspicion, he writes,

‘Inevitably, much of the evidence in such cases is hearsay or almost unprovable deduction, and one must reckon with the natural wish of colleagues to protect, as it were, a fellow-member of the club, especially when they don’t know, and can’t really be told, the full extent of the matter. This clearly happened in the case of Burgess and Maclean. (60)

MPs themselves are a club; very senior civil servants - ‘the Whitehall mandarins’ - are a club, members of MI5 and MI6 are a club; the British establishment, whether in public office or not, is a club. Most of these people also belong to various gentlemen’s clubs; some belong to that huge but secretive club, the Freemasons. Without casting any aspersions against any of these organizations, or their rules, regulations, restrictions, customs or obligations regarding ‘mutual support’ and ‘members in need’, it is not in the slightest surprising if individual members look out for the interests of each other, especially if they are friends and dinner and drinking companions. Over the years favours, large and small, are traded; when someone is potentially in trouble, fellow ‘club’ members are likely - rightly or wrongly - to help them out.

The sort of ‘corruption’ of which critics accuse Freemasonry is not the fault of Freemasonry any more than two members of any other club helping each other is the fault of that club. In most cases it’s questionable whether it’s even corruption. Really it’s simply human nature, for good and for bad. But those who spend their lives looking for evil, will find it everywhere.” (61)

That is another way of demeaning the quest for honesty - simply put it down to a ‘natural human act’ when the essence of cronyism is against the good of society or of questionable ethic. Reading Hegel and Machiavelli gives one great insight into how well our leaders use and train us to be just the kind of unethical people that will accept what they do in a big way. Thus we are accepting of it because we are used to doing the same kind of thing. If you don’t know your soul there is room to justify even incest and rape (especially in war). The dialectic or ‘playing both ends against the middle’ is so well refined that we could easily be convinced there really is no better way - given the nature of the human beast. Recently the coverage blackout on the Bilderbergs (started in the early 50s by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands as forwarded by the OSS - the nation not the religious land [nether-land].) was lifted and Katharine Graham’s control of the U.S. publishing interests seems to have diminished as a result. However, there are those who expect the ‘octopus’ or Medusa has grown a new arm or head. The Masonic Order does this every time they get a little too well known and whenever an organization has a certain number of members.

Thus we will see that they really are just important world leaders getting together and we will therefore reasonably expect that is all they ever were. Cecil Rhodes ‘Round Table’ even had a newsletter, and his Committee of 300 truly had all the best of the leaders. Who could suspect them of arranging wars (like the Boer War that A & E has recently laid at his feet) in order to sell armaments or finance new political regimes like Hitler and Stalin (Rothschilds money went to both). Today it may be the IMF or World Bank and the arbitrage that provides the insiders with all their productive output and interest earned. Who can say the rich really deserve all the tax breaks or national sweetheart deals and matching funds?

Cecil Rhodes is an outgrowth of a high Masonic club that was supposedly outlawed in Bavaria and we will touch on Adam Weisthaupt and his Illuminati some more. They were founded on May 1st of the same year the U.S. Declaration of Independence (the famous one, rather than the Mecklenburg one from North Carolina a year before) was instituted. May Day celebrations in Russia are held on that day for no other particular reason, are they? Wow! That is ‘heavy’ conspiracy talk, and I must be one of ‘those who spend their lives looking for evil’ as Barrett does say. But isn’t that the job of security people? And tell me who protects citizens and the average Joe?

Author of Diverse Druids
Columnist for The ES Press Magazine
Guest ‘expert’ for World-Mysteries.com

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