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'Boom and bust' man disagrees

In contrast to our top story today we bring you news that boom & bust man economist Fred Harrison doesn't think there is a soft landing at all – it will all end in tears with a damaging crash in – well – maybe 2010.

The economist refutes current expert wisdom and says UK house prices are likely to plummet in 2010 following the end of the property market's most recent property cycle.

In his book Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010 Harrison sets a scenario quite different to how other experts see the future. Harrison has studied several industrial nations over the last 300 years and concludes there is an 18-year property cycle which has recurred all over the world and in different political and economic conditions. The current UK cycle will come to an end in 2008, he says, with a damaging crash two years afterwards.

Harrison advertised his ideas to the nation as he told BBC Radio Five Live's Wake Up To Money programme: "We always see a ripple effect that starts in London and the south-east and then reaches out to the farthest corners of the United Kingdom.”

"We're now into the final phase of the second ripple effect. In the past six months it's been London and the southeast that's had most of the gains, and this will creep out to the rest of the UK before we see the crash."

But on the same programme, another property expert rubbished Harrison's views: "We haven't got indications of massively high interest rates on the way, we have not got indications that unemployment is going to go through the roof, and we have a shortage of supply of property in many many areas," Peter Bolton King, chief executive of the National Association of Estate Agents said.

"That does not indicate, from an economic point of view, that we're suddenly going to see a crash," he concluded.