It has been a stressful week for anyone trying to keep a weather eye open for the economic storms that are expected to break in the next few months.

The Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Office of Budgetary Responsibility and the Governor of the Bank of England queued up to make ever more alarming predictions of financial doom.

Which makes it so very curious that property prices in the prime central London area are still on the way up.

We are witnessing a flight of capital from the countries most at risk of economic meltdown, notably Greece, Italy, Portugal and Ireland. Many wealthy families from the Eurozone are moving their wealth to shell companies in offshore tax havens, using their corporate status to avoid paying stamp duty on the sale of their very high-end properties (because the corporation remains in ownership of the property, only its shares being transferred, no change is made on the title deeds and no stamp duty is payable).

High net worth Britons are also buying, confident that the Regent's Park and Marylebone areas in particular will hold their value much more reliably than other forms of investment with the possible exception of gold – and the price of gold is now so high a crash is likely to occur immediately the general economic climate shows signs of improving and all the investors pile out as fast as they piled in.

It is clear that the next couple of years are not going to be much fun for anybody, but in our favoured part of the metropolis we are reasonably confident of a steady passage.