The London Times consolidates a range of stories from the past couple of days to declare that the housing market has turned. One swallow does not make a summer, but it seems reasonable to see this as an inflection point. The top was called about April by the FT, after bearish commentators like fund manager Tony Dye and economist Roger Bootle had come out of the woodwork. This has fed through into sentiment and the data. The crowning moment was clearly Mervyn King’s comment in the spring, and the fundamental effect of rising interest rates.

Taking into consideration the pensions crisis and high levels of personal borrowing, other things being equal, it is not difficult to imagine a fairly bleak economic future with persistently low house prices and lower levels of personal consumption, despite efforts by the Bank of England to show these are not directly linked. Of course necessity is the mother of invention, so harder times might generate the inventive spark that will produce the new economic growth to get us out of any long-term hole and into a healthy and happy retirement. But looking from today, society may not be very well equipped for such a venture. In particular, the falling level of numeracy (the number of people enrolling to become maths teachers apparently fell off a cliff in 2001) does not bode well for our economic future. Maths maths teaching is a subject I will return to time and again.

How would this be reversed? In the early 18th century British economic growth was constrained because charcoal was the only useful source of fuel to make good quality iron. The supply of wood for burning had natural limits. Abraham Darby left Bristol in the early 18th century for Coalbrookdale, experimented with coke to produce cheap iron to make pots, and the industrial revolution was born. The rest, as they say, is history.

Whether any of the technological advances of the past few years are as profound as we feel they are, and as profound as Darby’s, only time will tell. It could be that the sequential financial crises of the past few years that seem to be culminating in a global housing bubble are just a hiccup, although possibly severe, in a much deeper economic and social change than even the technophiles and dotcommers appreciate.

The third day of the reading experiment and so far failing miserably to adhere. Will try and read a lot from the Economist Tuesday before the school run. Today’s interesting news was a further fall in mortgage advances last month, and reports that asking prices have fallen quite sharply in parts of London: the first signs, some would say, of the long-awaited property reversal. The good news, from the point of view of my bias experiment, is that I got this word of mouth. It is perhaps the sort of story I would have sought out.

Meanwhile, an interesting idea on the mortgage front, which came to me via the Motley Fool message boards: the securitisation of mortgage debt may mean that lenders have much less leeway in dealing with arrears than in the early nineties. Then, most debt was still owned by the lending institutions and had not been sold on in the mortgage backed-securities market as bonds. Don’t know how true this might be, but it made me shudder to think that “what might be different this time” would be that repossessions happen more swiftly and with even less ceremony than they did in the nineties, as the lenders face a more stringent need to maintain the credit-rating of their bonds. I’m glad this suggestion did reach me, because a couple of weeks ago I read Liar’s Poker, Michael Lewis’ account of yuppie life at investment bank Salomon Brothersn in the 1980s. The organizational hubris and frequent stupidity that lay behind the creation of such large and powerful market forces is very worrisome. These markets have now bedded into the financial system and both their existence and assumed safety seem to be taken for granted.

The longer term consequences of this spreading of risk are far from clear, although it is generally thought to be a good thing. For a more cautious point of view, John Nugee and Avinash Persaud of State Street produced a good piece in the FT last Friday.

The key moment in the Dyke documentary was his conversation with Guardian columnist David Aaronovitch. He told Dyke that it was his own personal failing of needing always to win, which caused the original confrontation with government spin doctor Alastair Campbell over the Iraq dossier story to career out of control. He should have stepped back, taken a deep breath and promised to investigate the government’s gripe, Aaronovitch said.

When major corporations come threatening news people, the best tactic is to slow them down by listening politely, promising to investigate, and buy enough time to allow them to lose interest, or at least calm down. If you upset them before their first Starbucks of the morning, there is even greater value in playing for a little more time! Don’t know if Campbell is a coffee drinker, but his behaviour during that period indicated some deficiency.

I’ve had a couple of experiences where a non-confrontational tactic ends up with the accuser almost accusing themselves, at which point they realise what they were complaining about is harmless. The problem for journalism managers is that big confrontations don’t come very often, so you don’t get much opportunity to practice. Most, like Dyke, seem to follow the pattern of movie script martyrdom and insist that they stand by their story. Very few stories are worth it. But then, as in the playground, much of the posturing is a craving for attention, positive or negative. Good journalism, like so much, is not really about that. One of the more profound insights into this affair was written contemporaneously, by whom I now forget. The essence was that we are more outraged by accusations of bad things that we thought to do, but chose not to, than things we would not have dreamed of doing in the first place.

A follow-up interview with Dyke appears in the Grauniad today.

I won’t be the only person to notice the wags at Channel 4 TV scheduling appear to have pulled a fast one on former BBC Director General Greg Dyke. Having offered him the chance to make a documentary on the Hutton report and his departure from the BBC under the banner “Betrayed by New Labour” (Sunday 8pm), they schedule a film to follow entitled “Get Over It”! Hope this will find its way into Private Eye, or the diary pages somewhere. I suspect hubris played no small part in his own downfall. Will be watching for any signs of such self-awareness. In my humble opinion, they broke a fundamental rule of management and good journalism: don’t stir up a hornets’ nest unless you have access to full protection and it is absolutely necessary. A subsidiary rule: always beware the self-righteousness of long-distance runners. I hear Alastair Campbell, the one-time Blair spin doctor who led the charge against the BBC, recently competed in the London Triathlon. Worrying.

Gerry Robinson, the former boss of UK media group Granada, hosts a famous TV show called I’ll Show Them Who’s Boss (formerly Troubleshooter.) Robinson is a controversial character who retired from Granada before the collapse of ITV Digital and the ensuing confusion in British digital TV project. Whether he was a genuine success at Granada is hard to judge. They gobbled up a lot of businesses under his tenure, consolidating British TV. However, in this week’s episode, a very interesting reversal took place, where he managed to get a failing family firm to reinstate the old general manager they had sacked two years before. He had been responsible for the business’s growth the prior 10 years.

What was interesting here was it seemed to show quite clearly the two types of business people: those that know how to create cashflows (sacked manager), and those who know how to appropriate them (family owners). Seems that Robinson himself may belong more to the latter camp, but he nevertheless appeared to have righted a wrong with everyone going away happy. Of course, who knows what reality looked like before the edit? The reinstated manager offered a simple wisdom: look after the people and the profits will come soon enough, suggesting that being process- rather than results-driven was the key to business success.