Martin Wolf hails Fred Harrison in today's FT 

I hestitate to reproduce the entire article because of copyright, but here is the URL:  http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8f06df9e-8ac1-11df-8e17-00144feab49a.html

Inter alia, he writes:

Third and most important, the opportunity for speculation in land both fuels – and is fuelled by – the credit cycle, which has, yet again destabilised the economy. In a superb new jeremiad, the journalist Fred Harrison argues that this cycle – with a duration of 18 years – was predictable and, by him at least, predicted.** In essence, he notes, buyers rent property from bankers, in return for a gamble on the upside. A host of agents gain fees from arranging, packaging and distributing the fruits of such highly speculative transactions. In the long upswing (the most recent one lasted 11 years in the UK), they all become rich together, as credit and debt explode upwards. Then, when the collapse comes, recent borrowers, the financial institutions and taxpayers suffer huge losses. This is no more than a giant pyramid selling scheme and one whose dire consequences we have seen again and again. It is ultimately, as Mr Harrison argues, a ruinous way of running our affairs.

I have long been persuaded that resource rents should be socialised, not accrue to individual owners. Yet, as Mr Harrison tellingly remarks, “as a community we socialise our privately earned incomes (wages and salaries), while our social income (from land) is privatised.” Yet, whatever one thinks of the justice of this arrangement, the practical consequences have become calamitous. Do we want to start yet another credit-fuelled property cycle as soon as the debris of the present one is cleared away, some years of misery hence?

-          Roger Sanderlands