The Evening Standard led today on the news that £600 million of flats have been sold in a four day kerfuffle around the new development at Battersea Power Station. The implication is that this is evidence of some kind of recovery.
It isn't. It is evidence of just how much our distorted economy depends on speculators. Our increasingly unaffordable homes market, just like the inflationary food market, increasingly pricing out more swathes of the population, is the result.
Whether it is the housing rules that allow foreign speculators to buy up homes in London and leave them empty, or whether it is Barclay's domination of the food speculation market, speculation is impoverishing us.
The speculative froth is increasingly distanced from people's real lives. It isn't evidence of emerging health, it is evidence of deepening sickness.