London Eyes a Distant Recovery
London – My first impression was that London is coming out of the recession in good shape. When we checked into our hotel in Bayswater, the desk clerk commented that the hotel was full and the shopping streets of Bayswater were teeming with people. The restaurants were full and the shops seemed to be doing business.
Stormcluds Over the Eye
But first impressions are not always accurate. Bayswater is now a neighborhood of immigrants and transients, which explains the busy restaurants. And my hotel had a particularly good offer. As I spoke to friends in the city and paid attention to the news broadcasts, quite another picture emerged. Real estate prices that seemed atrocious to me (that takes some doing if you live in high-cost Honolulu) were down 20% or more from their highs. A local news show visited an industrial park where 20% of the factory space was vacant, and the more we looked, the more retail space we saw with “For Lease” signs on them. Another news story averred that London has a quarter of a million people suffering from depression brought on by financial setbacks. I mentioned all this to a friend who is involved with Europe-wide project finance, and he said his bank’s economists aren’t expecting things to really improve in England or Europe as a whole until 2012. That’s a long time to wait and certainly at odds with all the ‘green shoots’ that the politicians claim to be seeing.
