2008 Financial Crisis

Shall we do a 10 year retrospective a year early? Why not.

I feel this event has completely defined my adult life (I was 13/14 in 2008), only really ever knowing jobs, over-priced rent, my Dad struggling to find regular work, everything from pubs to libraries to doctor surgeries shutting.

However, I don’t really remember how it was before 2008. Was everything a bit more prosperous, or was it just as straitened as it has been for the past nine years? How did it affect you, if it did? Are we still living in its effects? Do you think it will be remembered similarly to the Great Depression of 1930s?

It would be great to hear from people who were adults before 2008 especially.

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Lock this thread until 2018

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i graduated with a 2:2 in animation in 2007 and like to blame the fact that ive never had a job in that field on the credit crunch and not on the fact that there are v few animators in the uk and most of them were better qualified than me anyway

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From the wikipedia page

The active phase of the crisis, which manifested as a liquidity crisis, can be dated from August 9, 2007, when BNP Paribas terminated withdrawals from three hedge funds citing “a complete evaporation of liquidity”.[21]

Just a few weeks out

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There was definitely a prosperous era before this, high house prices, a lot consumerism. I remember my brother being given a 110% mortgage which seems hard to believe now. When I came out of uni in 2003 jobs seemed reasonably easy to come by and you didn’t have to do any of this unpaid internship nonsense.

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An inevitable, practically aimed for, purely ideological decision to keep as many of us in poverty and in the fetters for as long as possible.
The staggering amount of inflation we have coming up once we’ve pandered to morons and racists will make this social cleansing look like a picnic though.

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Yep, I wanted a bank loan for a car. They offered me 1.5 times my annual salary as an unsecured loan.

Absolutely mental

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if it’s all you’ve ever know why do you think it defined your life afterwards?

That’s why I’m trying to find out a bit more about it.

What I remember is that before 2008 I would buy rare and often obscure vinyl from sellers in the USA. And everything seemed like a bargain because it was $2 to £1.

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No. The 2008 financial crisis was just a mere blip compared to the Great Depression.

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Oh right, to answer your question, it was fucking horrible. I was 18 in 2008, so I have a good memory of how good the country actually could’ve been. I got educational maintenance allowance as a teenager so I actually got paid to go to school. People could afford to live happily. Towns had buses and libraries. Not a utopia but you know basic society existed.
By 2011 the entire country had evaporated and all that was left were people 20 years older than me wondering why my generation couldn’t just walk into a job like they’d been able to.

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Started working in the construction industry in 2007 and remember that first year was definitely a feeling that our fees really didn’t matter and nor did anyone else. You could pretty much charge what you liked. Even now 10 years later our fees are nowhere near what they used to be. As one example developers were definitely making more money and took less notice of fees.

Not sure it’s truly over. It was the creaking of the breaking system and the ramifications include Trump, Brexit, strain on European relations etc. Think we might yet come to see it as a hugely important event in a bigger time line

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remember me and my brother were both looking for somewhere to stay at the same time so applied for a joint mortgage to see what would happen. he worked part time in mcdonalds and I didn’t have a job, no deposit at all. got an offer no bother.

decided not to bother in the end though, probably for the best.

Was just about to say this: the 2008 financial crisis has not ended.

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I graduated in July 2009 and worked two jobs in a supermarket and a greengrocers. Left the country in Dec 2009.

UK unemployment rate as a result of the 2008 financial crisis was at its worst 10.2% (in Oct 2009). It currently stands at 4.3%.

Does that include “economically inactive”? Because it’s been made harder and more depressing to stay registered as unemployed/claiming unemployment benefits as time goes on.

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The unemployment rate measures the number of people actively looking for a job as a percentage of the labour force.

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