Britain’s finance executives are becoming worried about the rocketing house prices and the instability it could cause to the overall economy.
The systemic risk survey is a questionnaire given by the Bank of England to participants on a biannual basis, asking them what they think the major risks, and their confidences in, the financial system in the UK.
The main find of this month’s survey is that 40% of British Banks, asset managers and hedge funds feel that a potential drop in the price of houses could lead to huge problems.
The prices of houses are going up, and this is often angrily attributed to the Help to Buy scheme, even though recent figures suggest the Mortgage Guarantee has only made up a tiny percentage of sales.
This was the third survey in a row to find that financial executives were worried about rising levels of house prices. The fear is that what goes up must come down, and that the property market will eventually crash.
However, the survey also found that fears of an overall financial crash are in fact lower.
Overall, these fears were the lowest since the 2008 economic crisis.
Anyone who has kept up to date with Help to Buy scheme news would be led to believe that it is responsible for rocketing house prices, which in turn is becoming the biggest threat to the economy. However, the systemic risk survey found that the market participants didn’t point to any particular likely cause of a high impact crisis in the market.