This week, it’s 2007.
• Average house price: £182,080
• Base rate at year-end: 5.50%
• House price inflation: 4.8%
• General inflation: 2.3%
• Oscar Best Picture winner: The Departed
• Best-selling album: Back to Black, Amy Winehouse
• Must-have Christmas toy: Nintendo Wii
• Christmas number one: Leon Jackson, When you believe
Mortgage/housing market highlights
• The housing and mortgage markets were raging at the highest recorded levels ever seen to finish the year with £363bn of mortgage lending. Kensington was bought by Investec this year and the specialist mortgage lending market, which included a self-certification sector estimated to constitute almost half of all lending, had swollen to 50 lenders. These providers were largely funded by securitisation models with low interest rates driving on a house price and consumption boom in both the UK and US. Repossessions and arrears were at record lows. But all was not well. The collapse of Bear Sterns in the US in 2006 was the first sign of instability for the global securitisation markets which rippled out to destroy the UK’s biggest mortgage lender Northern Rock’s funding model, which was 50% driven by securitised funding in H1 2007. The BBC’s business editor Robert Peston broke the news in September that Northern Rock was in trouble starting the first run on a UK bank in well over 100 years ushering in what was to become the collapse in the UK mortgage market, which was to more than half over the next two years.
This year’s highlights
January 9 – Apple Inc.’s CEO and founder, Steve Jobs, announces the first generation iPhone (it goes on sale in the United States on June 29).
February 2 – Martti Ahtisaari unveils a United Nations plan for the final status of Kosovo; Serbian leaders denounce the proposal.
April 16 – Virginia Tech shooting: Seung-Hui Cho, a South Korean expatriate student, shoots and kills 32 people at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, before committing suicide, resulting in the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in United States history.
May 3 – British child Madeleine McCann disappears from an apartment in Praia da Luz, Portugal.
June 28 – 2007 European heat wave: in the aftermath of Greece’s worst heat wave in a century, at least 11 people are reported dead from heatstroke, approximately 200wildfires break out nationwide, and the country’s electricity grid nearly collapses due to record breaking demand.
July 21 – The final book in J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is released and sells over 11 million copies in the first 24 hours, becoming the fastest selling book in history.
August 9 – The French global bank BNP Paribas in the United Kingdom blocks withdrawals from three hedge funds heavily committed in sub-prime mortgages, signaling the 2007–2012 global financial crisis.
August 17 Northern Rock asks the Bank of England .for emergency funding assistance
Mid-September Northern Rock’s shares plunge and the BBC’s business editor Robert Peston’s report on the ailing bank results in a run on the bank with queues of customers scrambling to take out their cash
October 8 – Track and field star Marion Jones surrenders the five Olympic medals she won in the 2000 Sydney Games, after admitting to doping.
November – High Speed 1 from London to the Channel Tunnel is opened to passengers.
December 19 – Vladimir Putin, President of Russia, is announced as Time magazine’s 2007 Person of the Year.
Former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto is assassinated, and at least 20 others are killed, by a bomb blast at an election rally in Rawalpindi.
