> When and how will it end? The situation is caused by the government attempting to control lending cost. This has happened before and it will happen again. Es

> When and how will it end? The situation is caused by the government attempting to control lending cost. This has happened before and it will happen again. Essentially governments are currently attempting to create a massive wealth transfer from, well mostly everybody, to their favored causes (firstly to government spending, and second to property values, through banks). To do this they are taking out what effectively are huge loans. So central banks are painting themselves into a corner. They are making it extremely easy for the government to borrow. Why ? Because this will make it easy for those governments to pay off the debt burden that has become too much for them. Of course governments aren't paying off debts at all, rather they are increasing spending (look past the austerity rhetoric to the actual numbers : taking into account that their debt servicing cost is decreasing by a LOT, they're actually increasing spending by over 10%, all of them). This makes those debt burdens a lot worse, because that cheap borrowing cost is temporary. Debt that is serviceable at 0.2% interest costs double as much in debt service at 0.4%, which is a tiny change. So the situation becomes more and more unstable. This could last a few years though. So what will happen next. Most/all of the governments in Europe (and the US) will likely end up in the position Greece was in 2 years ago, or worse, due to a tiny rise in interest rates. Then they will default on at least some debt. This will cause an enormous spike in interest rates, so it will become prohibitively expensive for governments to loan money at all, and they will lose the ability to rollover debt. So they either come up with 100% of GDP without loaning money (ie. massive inflation), or they default on more debt. This will crash banks (but don't worry : government guarantees have been gutted so it won't cost the government anything. Google "bail-in legislation"). At this point interest rates will shoot up to 10%, maybe 20%. All those investment properties in Londen will suddenly be extremely costly to their investors (their monthly payments will double or triple in a year), and go on the market (the problem is not too little housing, the problem is that for the moment it's too valuable to invest in real estate, given the rising prices). And then we're back in 1992 or so. > buckling themselves in with the student debt and the mortgage to spend their entire adult life under the heel of the capitalists. Sadly, you can be assured of one thing : when this story has played out, you'll be worse off than today, for at least a few years. And God help those with student debt, or even worse : those with student debt backed by a state (US, UK, Australia, Netherlands all have large amounts of people with lots of student debt backed by the state).