 A sudden tightening of credit (interest rates were raised to 13% in October 1973) was laid at the feet of the Bank of England.Others blame the Heath government's fixing of rent price rises in 1971.The only book-length study of the crisis by Reid (1982) blames all those factors but also a bubble of housing prices that saw a 50% increase in London real estate prices over 1971 and the financial uncertainty caused by the end of the Bretton Woods agreement and the inconclusive elections of February 1974.