Question to people aged 40+

I have seen 3 crashes, the causes of these are very similar (human behaviour).

Part of the process of recovery is to present the public with the situation in as realistic a way as possible. Austerity strategy did not work.There were clearly people who did very well out of the 2008 crisis and the most recent slump. I think the current situation is very different and maybe you wont see again in your lifetime because it is related to war. Its worth hanging onto what you remember from now because it will be rewritten.

I'm only a bit older than you and I can remember it because I was doing my GCSEs at the time and it shaped my political development a lot when at university with all of the anti austerity stuff.   

I think you make an interesting point. I'm not old enough to compare to any other financial crises but the way we live is very very different to even my childhood, let alone before I was born. The cost of living isn't only a crisis because there's a financial one, we've almost created an unsustainable way of living. The majority of people not only have to pay a mortgage but most own a car which are now so hi-tech and expensive, phones, laptops, other gadgets. Obviously there are still some people that get the bus and don't own hi-tech stuff and they might still be struggling which is fair. But I think a lot of people will go omg I can't afford these basic necessities when actually they're probably paying for a smart phone and Netflix and a lot of things that aren't necessities yet we now see them as that.

It is also a very good point that it is difficult for individuals to compare a crisis because it depends how directly they were affected.

Recessions and bad times are personal. If you are affected they matter greatly, if you are not affected they largely pass you by. Even in the good times if you have no money you'd not be able to tell the difference.

Things are not as bad as the 70s, not by a long way. There is no cold war. Cost of living is a problem but I don't think it is the same, lifestyles are quite different now. Unemployment is not too terrible, there are jobs out there. The problem is actually more down to the technology, you get jobs by talking to people and networking, not applying to bots.

I lost my job at the start of the financial crisis and it took 14 months to get another, and only by taking a 50% cut in my overall package, something 15 years later I have still not made back up. I had a few weeks money left at the end and a lot of debts that needed servicing. I'd started showing symptoms of solitary confinement as I couldn't afford to go anywhere. The COVID lockdowns 12 years later gave me burnout as I couldn't do it again.

Like many replying already I was at University in the late 80s and entered the job market in 1989. Luckily a pharmacy degree in the 1990s was like gold dust and shielded me from most of the economic problems other have mentioned.

I do think though that the situation for people at the start of there adult lives is far worse now than it was then. Housing costs, job security, everyday prices, rents are all now much worse now than then. I look at the struggles so many of the young now will have to make in order to have the things I have had over my lifetime and my heart bleeds 

It was on all the main news channels, but sorry I have no back-ups to my memory

Certainly a bad time to graduate back then, there was fierce competition for what few job vacancies that there were.  I felt that I would have been better off if I had just left school and got a job rather than spending three years at university (while the unemployment rate soared).  My father didn't understand as he had not known such difficult times to get work but my grandparents did as they lived through the tough economic times of the 1930s.

TheCatWoman said:

the work situation was so bad that if you were a young person and not living with parents and out of work, the state would move you around the country every fortnight to a new area to find work, of which there was none. I remember the police marching young people across the country, people were so appalled they were coming out of their houses and giving care packages to those being marched around.

I can't remember that - do you have any links to back that up, please?  I can remember (1984?) the Government of the time, cracking down on unemployed young people (under 25s) who left home to move to seaside towns to live, claiming housing benefit to cover their rent. 

I think a lot of today ill's can be traced back to Thatcher, Ghost Town is a good example of how things felt then. It wasn't just the selling off of all our national assets into private hands, but the way in which it was done created privately owned monoplies instead of public one's. The telephone system was a good example, as is water, competition was a myth, it's the same water no matter who you pay your bills too and being private companies they put profit first.  I remember having good cheap bus services that went where you needed them to go at times you needed them.

But even more importantly it was what her policies did to the fabric of society, the poll tax, sounds fair, on the surface, but in practice it was a disaster, a family living next door but one to me, were paying a huge sum of money, because they had two college age sons living at home, plus an elderly parent, they ended up paying 5 lots of poll tax on a 3 bed ex council house. The sale of council houses and the refusal to allow councils to invest in public housing has led directly to the housing crisis we have now.

The attacks by government on gay people was scary, far scarier than today, if they could of got away with it I really believe they would of made being gay a crime again. Teenage pregnancies were at an all time high and yet they cut sex education in schools in the belief that if you didn't tell young people about sex then they wouldn't do it. Racial minorities were under attack too, that's another legacy of Thatcher, the imigation problems and how they're not dealt with.

Child poverty went up massively too, parents out of work because of the intentional shut down of industry in favour of a "service economy", before that child poverty had been going down. There was a closure of youth centres and other public services and surprise surprise vandalism and petty crime went up. Young people were demonised as lazy and bad, the work situation was so bad that if you were a young person and not living with parents and out of work, the state would move you around the country every fortnight to a new area to find work, of which there was none. I remember the police marching young people across the country, people were so appalled they were coming out of their houses and giving care packages to those being marched around. The whole country felt like a tinderbox, there were frequent riots, the threat of nuclear war was very real. 

This was an age when everyone from government to ordinary people were encouraged to think of the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Of course not everything was rosy before Thatcher, we had 3 day weeks, The Winter of Discontent and over mighty trade unions and some things were very backward and took ages. But what Thatcher did wasn't the answer and people like Blair pandering to her legacy and going further down the privatisation route was just as bad.

I finished university at the height of the Thatcher cuts in the early 1980s. I was unemployed for two years with my shiny new science degree. If you listen to 'Ghost Town' by The Specials it will give you some idea of the zeitgeist. The 2008 financial crisis was a mere blip compared to the misery of the early Thatcherite era, the later 'Loadsamoney' boom, which only really put money in the hands of London stock market traders, tends to overshadow the dire earlier period for those who did not live through it. My wife was at school with Nick Leeson a derivatives trader whose speculative trades resulted in the 1995 collapse of Barings Bank. In its effect on ordinary people 2008 was chickenfeed in comparison to Thatcherism. She sold off the national 'family silver' which we are still dealing with the consequences of, with bankrupt water companies who have not invested in infrastructure, a not fit for purpose prison and probation service, disarticulated rail system, non-existent rural bus services etc. etc.

I think it’s worse now. 

We bought our first house in 2007, so got in just before it crashed and rates spiraled. But as we had to move city and jobs, we had to go back renting, and that was were the biggest change has been. Before renting was cheap and you saved to buy, but now rents impossible and keep younger generations in the chains of renting forever. When we did eventually get back on the housing ladder, it was a lot harder and there were bigger barriers -I was a contractor so we had to basically save half the value to buy a small place. 

I think it is harder, I read a stat once that the average age for buying your first place was 25, now it's 35. Younger people definitely have it harder.

pins said:

am I and my peers just "feeling" and "seeing" it because we're now adults?

I would say yes. You would have been shieded from it when you were young but now you are on your way to being wrinkly and have to deal with these sorts of financial environmental issues then you are very much on your own.

I've been through the late 1980s housing crash (15% mortgage rates made life difficult) and the 1995 crash and took time to look at the cycles of the markets going back hundreds of years.

There are always booms and busts but as we get more connected and global then the impacts are felt more widely and reported on the drama hungry 24 hour news channels.

There will be more booms and busts in future.

Do your own research to see how these work and how you can make them work to your advantage if you are an investor.

In addition to the comments made by others, I would add that the people with the lowest incomes are disproportionately affected as more of their income goes towards essential living costs such as rent, food, heating and electricity. 

People with the highest incomes are doing best at retaining or increasing their standard of living.

The state of the economy tends to move in cycles and waves, so it is likely that things will get better. Keep hope alive. 

Don't forget covid too. A lot of this stuff is beyond the control of any one government and trying to get international action takes ages and some refuse to take part, so big companies like banks and tech can basically set thier own rules or not and theres not a great deal a government can do about it. For example we have an over reliance on the banking sector and any attempt at real control of banks, results in threats to pull out of the City of London, which would crash our economy.

Some of it though is self inflicted like the Liz Truss budget, borrowing to give tax reductions whilst not dong anything to raise money for government spending was a disaster and would never work, People have been talking about trickle down economics since Thatcher and is dosen't work. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer having the crumbs from the rich persons table, is that really any better than surfdom or even slavery? Why do rich peope need to be rewarded as an incentive for working harder and the poor punished into working harder?

Brexit was another self inflicted wound, the whole things was poorly thought out and set up, if it was a national descision then it should of been a national, cross party group negoatiating a deal, rather than have the mess that we were left with by Johnson's Tories.

We are still feeling the effects of 2008 as TheCatWoman has said, but we are also affected by the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, Brexit and now the Trump Effect. Even with all these things I feel the economic crisis in the 80's impacted people more. Not only was there massive unemployment but the interest rate went so high that mortgage payments doubled in a very short time and many people had their houses repossessed. Also I would trust very little of the media, especially newspapers which are owned by people with enormous political biases. You really need to gather information widely and use your own judgement. Unfortunately I believe most of us can do nothing to influence any change, too much power resides with a tiny minority of people and that doesn't matter which country you reside in. My view is that AI will not be the miracle cure for our wows and that unemployment will rise to numbers similar to the 1920's and the Wall Street Crash. 

The 2008 crash was something that was concerning and resulted in individuals worrying about their job and so spending less, however it didn't have an immediate direct personal impact for most individuals in the UK, however brexit (causing price increases for the weekly shop) and energy prices increases in more recent times have had a personal impact on the finances of many individuals and so for the majority of individuals is I believe worse.

I don't think we've ever recovered from the 2008 financial crash, it wasn't of our making, but we, this country and the people ended up paying massively for the irresponsibilty of others. I had seen other finacial events, depressions, massive unemployment in the 1980's. I do think when you encounter your first one, it's a bit of a wake up call, but to be honest they dont' get any better.

Whilst looking at data and statistics will give you one view, it dosen't give the feelings of being in the midst of economic turmoil, worry about losing your job, how you will cope with increased costs etc.

There's not a great deal any individual can do about it, just be a canny shopper and spender and don't believe people who tell you they've got quick fixes, they haven't, if they had theses "fixes" would of been done already

no need to be sorry! though I'm not 40, i don't feel the above requires 40+, since we can look back and statistical data - yes things have got worse many times worse, nearly every year for like 30 years in the row, wages have gone down, from the front row seat the numbers have gone up but from the back-row you see the prices of everything have gone up way more then wages, we're on one of history worst financial crisis ever, but i still have HOPE! things are changing so rapidly with AI that i believe we will be all free soon! we just need to hold out 5 - 10 years more! which is nothing! it;s fairly short-term compared to a lot of things! Wall of China toke 5000 years to build! 

It will get better! all you need is that spark of HOPE! what are your special obsessions atm? - go do more! and wait for the storm to pass, then reach out into the light!