No it wasn’t

The housing market was halted on Thursday night by the Government after financial institutions said they could no longer operate properly.

Ministers are discouraging buyers from going ahead with house sales and purchases unless they have ­already exchanged contracts as part of wider efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus, saying no one should move unless absolutely necessary. ­

The effect of the government saying “we strongly advise you not to do it” might well be to slow the housing market down to a near halt. But it’s still not true that the government has halted it. We didn’t actually elect Ritchie you know.

5 thoughts on “No it wasn’t”

  1. Bloke in North Dorset

    Related: Babylon Bee stings again

    Government Accidentally Shuts Itself Down With Ban On Non-Essential Businesses
    March 26th, 2020

    WASHINGTON, D.C.—Congress has asked all non-essential businesses to limit their hours or close entirely for an undetermined amount of time.

    But this shutdown mistakenly shut down the most non-essential entity of all: the government. For a brief period of time, all government in the United States was illegal, since it is completely non-essential to everything.

    “Oops,” said Senator Mitch McConnell. “We meant non-essential private businesses. Of course, the government is always essential, even when it’s not doing anything or is making things worse.”

    Senators, congresspeople, and bureaucrats frantically rewrote the ban to include only businesses that actually produced something and not government agencies that just watched other people make stuff. Though they had dragged their feet on passing bills related to relieving the financial distress of the shutdown, they passed this revision in record speed, almost as quickly as they vote for pay raises for themselves.

    Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said she would have caught the mistake but had passed the ban in a hurry, saying, “We had to pass the ban to see what it did.”

  3. rhoda klapp

    The housing market has been put on hold because of the virus, not some government announcement. Nobody is looking at houses, the estate agents are closed, nobody wants strangers viewing their house. It will resume, probably with pent-up demand, as soon as restrictions come off. Of course there may be a surplus of dead people’s properties on the market in due course, but as death rates are NO DIFFERENT to a normal year, probably not.

  4. Diogenes

    Meanwhile the house builders are no longer even pretending to build. But I bet they are happily banking land

  5. Mohave Greenie

    Here house building continues apace. The builders seem to practice social distancing quite well. The environment they work in has excellent ventilation. Significant amounts of UV light are available for disinfectant.

  6. Pcar

    @BiND

    Thanks

    @Mohave Greenie

    +1 yet spiteful prod noses want them all sent home. Also builders, gardeners etc probably have stronger than most immune systems

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