Was the year 2005 a peak year?

Let's go back to the GOLDEN YEAR of 2005 ?

Price of oil is around $40- $60




In 2005, it seems the number of domestic European flights (ryanair.com) while fuel costs were still low increased dramatically!


....This was probably helped by the fact Ryan air regularly gave away millions of (excluding airport taxes) free plane tickets.



Tickets today in 2008 are around $10 - $20 (from England to the South of Spain) which is over 10 times the cost from 2005, but still less than the cost of a cab (for me) from Burbank to Hollywood.

I wonder how long this $10 - $20 ticket price will last?

From London (Stansted)

FreeBelfast (City) £10
Aarhus £10Dublin £10
Frankfurt (Hahn) £10
Glasgow (Prestwick) £10
Knock £10Newquay £10
Oslo (Torp) £10
Shannon £10Turin

Maybe for a while longer as I see Ryanair have started by being sneaky....with bags and check-in prices increasing. This will not interfere with their aggressive 'cheap ticket' campaign and with less bags checked in (due to people taking less with them) this will actually save the airline fuel (which has suddenly become more expensive since 2005).

,
Ryanair hikes bag and check-in charges

Ryanair today raised the cost of putting bags in the hold and checking in at airports as the high cost of oil forced airlines to scrabble for extra revenues.

It is interesting to note, house prices in 2005 had been skyrocketing like mad for five years!



Those were good times...

But what are we doing now? Are we trying to fix a situation, so we can go straight back to what we were doing in 2005? My intuition says there was no golden year of 2005... I see the boom was not real and we are simply paying back for the credit madness now. What we had was: “a demonstrably fragile financial system that has produced unimaginable wealth for some, while repeatedly risking a cascading breakdown of the system as a whole”. These words from a guy named Paul Volcker, who was the former Federal Reserve chairman.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/11/business/11norris.html
As the credit crisis has slowly expanded and worsened, there has been a flurry of activity in Washington to reduce the damage from it. There are bailouts and tax breaks, and even checks to parents of school-age children. But there is remarkably little action aimed at getting the credit system functioning again. In part, that is because there is a scarcity of ideas. Paul Volcker, the former Federal Reserve chairman was right this week when he said the financial engineers had created "a demonstrably fragile financial system that has produced unimaginable wealth for some, while repeatedly risking a cascading breakdown of the system as a whole."

This guy calls it "The Bush Recession" and "We can fix it all..."
http://www.visitorfromtomorrow.com/?p=79&ref=patrick.net

This guy asks "How far is too far?" and "Is there anything the U.S. Federal Reserve won't do?"
http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/issues.aspx?Fed-White-House-and-Congress-bail-out-Wall-Street-1656

By the way, I think it was quite easy to predict a UK housing bubble going pop. Although different to the US bubble (there is still a demand for a primary place of residence) the growth of house prices have become unfordable. Once prices have climbed too high, the demand for living space is no longer enough (mortgages are out of people's reach) so to move inventory, prices have to come down to sustainable levels. Buyers will once again be looking for dwellings according to what they can afford.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/money/main.jhtml?view=DETAILS&grid=&xml=/money/2008/04/08/bcnhsbc208.xml
UK housing bubble is bursting and it's serious

I leave you with another interesting blog to read about intuition!
http://www.intuition-blog.com/?cat=1
Intuition Blog :: Intelligence for the 21st Century