Scanning the globe, it is interesting to observe what “making it” means for different nationalities: For example in Russia, where wealth has given the word obscenity a less than substantial meaning, one pre-supposes that success is measured in terms of the number of bodyguards employed. Whereas in Zimbabwe right now, where the entire infrastructure has collapsed, it probably means protecting your family from cholera and starvation.

In the UK, it has, since the 1950s, meant owning your own home: However, in the eighties, under successive Tory governments, somehow this concept took an ugly turn for the worse, and this mantra has been perpetuated by even the staunchest socialist leaders.

Thatcherism brought with it a new type of social vanity – a need to not only keep up with the “Joness’” but at whatever cost, to outdo them.

Now, more than at anytime in UK history, a person is judged by the house they live in and the car they drive – even though in most cases, they actually own neither. The house is mortgaged and the car is purchased on finance – but it really doesn’t matter, because appearances are everything.

I myself only suffered from this self-delusion of “mine is bigger than yours” twice in my life: The first time was in the school yard when I was eight years old, and the second time lasted about twenty years, during a period of my life I now term “the corporate years”

But I digress; let’s get back to this fixation with homeownership.

Don’t get me wrong, I do believe that homeownership is often desirable. It can be a means for providing good, secure housing and also for allowing moderate-income families to accumulate wealth. It is therefore reasonable to have policies like a limited mortgage interest deduction or credit that make it easier for low- and middle-income people to become homeowners. But, given the current situation, it is long past time for the blind faith in homeownership to be subjected to serious scrutiny.

We now know that the economy has sunk into a recession and faces the worst financial crisis since the depression – possibly even worse than that. The unemployment rate is rising, the foreclosure rate is soaring and home prices are plummeting.

Isn’t it time we settled some scores with the people who led us into this unholy mess?

If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know exactly who is at the top of my list – yep, it is one Alan Greenspan for his negligence and total incompetence in allowing the housing bubble to expand to ever more dangerous levels and ignoring the explosion of predatory mortgages.

Then we have the mortgage brokers who made the predatory loans and the so-called “Wall Street wunderkinds” who repackaged them in complex financial parcels and sold them all around the world.

We cannot possibly exclude the builders and the real-estate companies who profited from and promoted the irrational exuberance that fed the housing bubble – they are equally culpable in my view and must take their place in the dock.

Finally, we must also include the evangelists of homeownership on the list. These are the people who pushed the ideology of homeownership as an end itself. They insist on lavish government subsidies, even in situations where homeownership is not a good solution for the people affected.

Tomorrow: I will share with you some simple mathematics, that may just surprise you, and I also intend to further expose the continuing incompetence of Gordon Brown – financial wizard? Hardly.

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