1

PJ

And it took them how long to work this out? More to the point the Scrutiny panel have wasted how much time and money to come to this conclusion?

Every Islander has knowen that rents would be through the roof since the project was first launched – is it any wonder no-one wants to trade their and out of town!

Well done Senator Ferguson!

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3

Mogit

Yer gotta larf ain’t yer !!! these “educated” people have only just discovered what we already knew – PATHETIC!!!

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5

bella

the shops they put there would have to be something special for me to walk down there
bad enough having to walk from the end of town with heavy shopping and a non existing town bus.

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7

the future

Lowering the prices at the new Liberty Wharf shopping centre will also lower the prices in King Street. There is more supply than demand.

I am sure the powers that be will not allow the normal market adjustments to happen as that would substantially reduce rental income from commercial property.

So lets see what the solution will be, rainy day funds or other diverted funds will have to be abused to stop the collapse of commercial rents in St Helier.

Please let market forces dictate the price of rents.

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9

Jacqueline

I can’t wait to see this island on its backside due to our inept goverment. Roll on I say, Roll on.

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11

PM

Well done Sarah Ferguson for telling us what everyone ( except Senators Ozouf, Le Sueur and Cohan )in the buisiness comunity had guessed ages ago. Why are most of the ” quality retail units ” on and around the waterfront still empty.
The develpers don’t mind as they have budgeted for this and in a few years will be going to Cohan, open hands, saying they have complyed with his Planning remit, can’t fill the units so can they now please have change of use to resiential.

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13

Doggee Donuts

This island will always be a laughing stock while its run by a load of half witts.

Do you honestly think it could be worse if it fell under uk control.

Haute de le garenne,GST & upside down banannas
“THIS IS JERSEY” its truly unbelievable.

Life enriching “not” Life embarassing absolutlely!

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15

Nick

The problem with this development is timing! It was decided on when the High Street Shop and Consumer spending were leading the way fueled by credit from the Banks and rising house prices putting spending power in the mass consumer pocket.
Unfortunately in the time it has taken to bring the scheme in, the economic cycle has moved on into recession, and High Street Shops in general have suffered at the hands of their Internet competitors who don’t have the overheads associated with a shop premises and so can undercut the shop prices.
Good for the Consumer? Well yes price wise.
Good for the ongoing existence of the High Street shop and the draw and interest they provide to town centers? No.
The example is in fast food chains in America of which it was found that when they opened in a provincial town undercut even the best run restaurant competitor there simply on price! The fact that the food did not compete was irrelevant, once there was a cheap alternative the better option quality wise had to close due to market size.
So what is the answer, well economically the first stage is for Bank’s to stop being so up tight about lending at proper reasonable rates to the consumer! It is a fundamental flaw in the whole “Quantitative Easing” program that it has been aimed solely at the corporate entity and not their customer, the proverbial “Man/woman in the street”.
Credit Card rates need to be more geared to the base rate instead of being set permanently high whether that rate is high or low!
There is an argument that if you want to preserve interesting Town Center shops you are going to have to do something to control or level the playing field by taking some official action such as an internet supply tax from those internet operators, who are after all the high tech equivalent of the guy with a suitcase and no street trading licence outside Selfridges or Harrods!
The choice is the consumer’s, and unfortunately I think if left that way a low price will always win!
So where does that leave this development? Well maybe more should be made of it’s marine environment? but that would be a slow process.
Restaurants? Competition in the area and in Town is already in danger of over supply!
Tourist shops? Would detract from those in the town center and day visitors tend not to be spending in recessionary times.
Maybe for now they should just keep the old Abattoir doors shut? Not very imaginative!
So just open the space and let it evolve, let the market decide what should be there, trust the consumer!
Oh and put the other scheme on hold for the time being.

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17

Pip Clement

Will someone point out to Nick that you cannot continue pumping ever more credit in to the economy.
Eventually it has to be repaid somehow, the whole credit crunch came about because money was lent on a massive scale to people who could never repay.
The loans were then packaged up and resold to people who should have known better.
Trillions of dollars of this debt is now sitting on the balance sheets of almost every financial institution in the world.
Banks will spend the next twenty five years chiseling their ordinary customers on services to repay this debt.

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19

Nick

Pip Clement, I understand your fear of indescriminate lending but that is not what I am advocating!
What caused this credit crunch is that the wholesale money supply to that market dried up!What caused that was largely down to a change in the way people keep their wealth.
The capital gain possibilities of property ownership in a rising market, coupled in the UK with the capital tax advantages, meant that instead of people saving money with the Banks and Building Societies (at let’s face it hardly startling rates of return) more and more people regarded the equity in their house (That part of the capital value of their property that they assumed belonged to them over and above the amount of their mortgage)as their “Nest egg”.
Whereas before, Banks and Building Societies could rely on a comparatively cheap and a readily available base source of liquidity from deposit and savings accounts to fund their loan book, all of a sudden people were holding that wealth in bricks and mortar wholly ignoring the fact that not only is that a less liquid form of asset,it is also an asset whose capital value can go down as well as up!
Also they had to rely on increasing borrowing to release that capital gain which in turn required the Banks to find more liquidity to fund the lending.
Borrowing on this basis is only good if it is used for further wealth generation. If it is used destructively on activity that produces nothing tangible e.g.food, drink, holidays, entertainment etc. then it is wholly unproductive.
The wise investor spreads the risk of a single market collapsing by a broad spread of investment type retaining at least 25% in a liquid form such as cash.
Bank customers now fall into three categories when it comes to how they hold their wealth:
a)Those with all their eggs in one basket in the hope of scoring a major capital or income gain.
b)Those who have spread their investments wisely, including those who hoard their wealth.
c)Those who don’t have any spare wealth to worry about.
Instead of designing loan products that facilitate all three of these areas and thus spreading the liquidity risk throughout the whole area of economic activity,Banks have introduced computer driven lending packages which depend on fixed criteria that require the customer to adapt to fit what are considered (Mainly by computer programmers and accountants, not bankers)ideal criteria.
To give an example of what I am on about, if you are young, in a job with any level of salary then the computer will rate you as a primary lending target,but if you are in your fifties, retired but receiving a pension, investment or other fixed income, tough!
And yet in the UK and in Jersey we have an increasing ageing population on fixed incomes, and increasing job insecurity amongst the younger generations, if in fact they have a job!
This coupled with the wholesale pursuit by lenders of the naturally conservative wealthy,who despite media hype are a smaller percentage of the population than you would think, results in over lending to the even smaller percentage of this category that wish to indulge in entrepreneurial activity.
It is no accident that some of the bigger property lending losses are actually in the commercial property market, not the domestic market, and HBOS for example was exposed to a very small number of borrowers with very large debts!
At the other end of the scale the only consumer finance readily on offer has been via the credit card at almost userous rates of interest!
The whole concentration has been on the consumer led section of the economy, where wholly unrealistic levels of consumption would be necessary to sustain the macro economic position.
What is needed is a much calmer more medium term approach and lending products that spread liquidity throughout the whole customer spectrum.
That way liquidity sources that are at present locked out of the system, such as the sustained capital growth in the housing stock, can be brought back into play and lending products will be geared to all the differing customer types at realistic rates, not just one or two categories because the represent the ideal as visioned by a computer programmer.
To an extent that means more manual intervention at grassroots level on the lending side of the banking industry and less computerization.
The safest lending market is one that is spread widely, much like the investment market.
In order to restore liquidity in the economy to proper levels to meet the demands of a growing and increasingly able population, and to revive all levels of economic activity, you need lending products that offer a way in, a way to stay in, and an acceptable way out if necessary, all at reasonable rather than userous rates.
An ideal? maybe,but we are not even close at the moment to adapting to the changing Macro economic situation that we are and will be facing in the future, and in the recent and expensive “Quantitative easing” program the consumer,the key player, has been sidelined and ignored, with money gravitating towards the corporate entity whether efficient and properly managed or not,whether catering for a demand for the product or not!

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