JP Morgan Annual Report

The JP Morgan Annual Report doesn’t make for cheery reading the only thing that made me smile was their nice prose which described “liquidity as evaporating” – I liked that. Financial reporting being tightly controlled the intro to the report on their various funds falls short of saying what they think will happen in the medium term, instead they concentrate on the near term and use phrases like “the near term outlook for the domestic economy remains poor”. They also suggest further and large write offs as more of the credit crunch unwinds.

Recession possibilities in the USA, slow down in China – not great news. The word that stands out on page 7 however is stagflation. As all this stuff unwinds we’ll be doing our best to keep you abrest of it on our first time buyer and self employed websites for ftb mortgages and self cert mortgages.

Finance mortgage calculators

We are continually improving our financial websites such as the nowfirsttimebuyer website for first time buyer mortgages in the housing market and our nowselfemployed website for self certification mortgages.

We finally got out our rather clever Mortgage Calculator across all the sites and have been interested to see how sticky our sites become – so we are now ok with Search Engine Optimisation becoming Time Engine Optimisation (see earlier article). Average time on site has shot up and visitor engagement is much higher.

We’ve added it to the Buy To Let mortgage and landlord info website as well though have left it off the commercial loan and business loan site for obvious reasons. We’ll come up with a suitable tool for the Commercial Loan website soon.

Sub Prime USA

It hasn’t featured much on the news but the slide in UK equities is being caused by the debt crises (what another one?) in the USA. There the Sub Prime lending market is leaving some big holes and the resultant anxiety has brought the UK down as well. So is this the end to the boom in Sub Prime lending? That would seem unlikely – though a tightening of rules might be coming. Why unlikely? Simple really – the economy is now being driven by White Van driving self employed Joiners, Builders and Plumbers – all these folk find it difficult to declare steady incomes to the banks and instead need to “self declare” in the world of sub-prime. So the Sub Prime market will continue – but you might need to prove you drive a white van to get the loan you need.