Would-be first-time buyers have had a hard time of it. They want to buy a house, but time and again many are thwarted by the same problem. They can’t afford to buy a house. Not being able to afford something is a very common problem in markets.

It never rains, it pours. Hot on the heels of the Bradford and Bingley saga, we wake up today to the news that mortgage lending has hit a record low.

The Economist recently reported that “house prices are falling even faster than during the Great Depression”. The housing bubble kept inflating for far longer than most expected.

Ah! This is more like it! You know how the official, Consumer Price Index (CPI) inflation figure was 3.0% last month? Well, I don’t know about you, but that felt a bit low to me. I buy things.

British house prices fell in May by the most since at least 1991, according to Bloomberg:

The price of an average home dropped 2.5 percent from April to 173,583 pounds ($344,000), Britain’s fourth-biggest mortgage lender said today in a statement. That’s the largest decline since the index started in January 1991. From a year earlier, prices fell 4.4 percent.

“Captain, we’re running out of fuel!” “Don’t panic! Just burn up what little we have. And burn it faster!” Gordon Brown, crisis buster extraordinaire, has a solution to the energy crisis. Are you ready?

The US housing crisis looks sets to deepen after S&P’s/Case-Shiller Home Price index showed that home prices in 20 US cities fell almost 13% in February from a year earlier. This from AP:

“Month-to-month, it gets consistently worse,” said David Blitzer, chairman of the index committee at S&P, noting that February also marked the sixth straight month that all 20 cities experienced declines. “The slope is one direction. There is no sign of a bottom.”

With the London Stock Exchange closed and the Office for National Statistics shut, yesterday’s rainy Bank holiday Monday provided the perfect chance for us to look back at three stories that astounded us last week – but which somehow escaped without comment at the time.

A US government home-price index has posted the sharpest decline in its 17-year history – and analysts say things won’t get better until at least 2009.

Home prices fell 3.1% in the first quarter compared with last year, according to The Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight. This from AP:

Declines in the government index, which focuses on less expensive properties and includes fewer houses bought with risky home loans that have gone sour over the past year, show the depth of the housing market’s troubles.

You can’t blame Fannie Mae for trying. Last year saw British property buyers snap up around 20,000 homes in the United States.