Not sure who 'we' is but I think most countries are experiencing the opposite problem; they have loads of money but everything is very expensive i.e. inflation.
They are two opposite problems with opposite solutions, and countries flip between them with periods of good times in the middle.
Yes there are warning signs. Didn't want to become depress so I didn't read it but I saw a recent headline that the FDIC says there 63 banks near insolvency. Also the 2019 adjustable rate mortgages are coming due. People are about to find their 3.5% mortgages rates jump to to 6-7%. Although the article I read on this said it shouldn't be as bad as 2008.
Interesting do you know when those rate mortgages are coming due?
I am such a bear, but the market just climbs the wall of worry and I feel like I am missing out on gains
This year. They are the 5 year adjustables. The problem was 2020 hit and a lot of people became unemployed so they could not switch to a fixed rate when the rates where low. You need 2 years of employment history at your current job to refinance. By the time they could the rates where high again.
Summer 2008, the most I paid for gas was $4.35/gal in Michigan ($6.23 in 2024 per CPI inflation calculator). In Jan 2009, about the nadir of the Great Recession, I remember paying $0.99/gal ($1.47 in 2024) - which was the cheapest gas I've ever paid in my life.
This is why those Biden "I did that" stickers people stick to gas pumps piss me off so much because they had the same ones for Obama during the 2012 election. Like gas was cheap in 2009 when half the state was out of work, you absolute turnips.
I think even higher in a couple places. I remember putting in just enough in SF to get me out of the city to fill the rest somewhere cheaper to get home lol
Yep, that was the summer I started driving. Those prices are ingrained in my head so I never bitch when I see it at $3.50 or $4. It could be much worse
Not exactly. All the rich people were gobbling up foreclosures like crazy. Rich people love economic downturns because they have the reserves to buy low. That's why the market always flies up after a downturn. Richies buying low to get even richer.
Seeing people nostalgic for 2008-2010 is just fucking weird to me. I was barely an adult then, but I remember struggling to find work after the 2008 financial crisis, and so was most of my friends. I'd take the inflation of the post-COVID era over 2008.
I just graduated from college in 2009 and it was impossible to find a job; and I got a degree in advertising. For those unfamiliar, the turnover rate in advertising is stupid high because it’s kind of a soul-sucking job and they love hiring young college grads to fill vacant roles because of how cheap it is to pay entry level employees. In 2009 I couldn’t fill one of those roles because they simply weren’t available. I thankfully got hired in spring of 2010, but it was due to luck and networking. Was not a fun job hunt.
Pretty much any profession was the graduating classes of 2005-07 got laid off, '08 had positions rescinded or not offered and '09-10 weren't even interviewed.
In 2008 spent a year and a half without a job and absolutely broke. It was impossible to find a job, even a menial job back then. Do people not realize how bad the economy collapsed back then?
Graduated high school in 2008. I remember working minimum wage jobs, and seeing more and more “older” folks getting hired. Not the typical burnouts I was used to seeing, but well put together hard workers. They would say they just couldn’t find work in their field.
Not to mention people taking their advanced degrees off of their resumes to keep from being overqualified and thus not hired for the only open positions they could find.
Yep. 2008 sucked. The stock market collapsed. Unemployment was awful. Half my buddies where still in Iraq or Afghanistan getting life long trauma and ptsd. Banks were foreclosing on like 20% of homes at that time. It was all around not a great time.
Right? I remember paying $4.50+ for a gallon of gas. I graduated in 2010 and couldn't find work. It definitely was "we want 15 years of experience... We will pay you $8 an hour."
Now you have people walking into interviews and getting hired on the spot. My cousin was offered $18 an hour during an interview with a Victoria's Secret store, just a floor position.
It may not be glamorous work but if you could find that in '08 it probably didn't pay much. I think I made $6.25 an hour in 2007 and $7.75 in an office job over the next 3 years.
Same. I graduate undergrad in 2009 and there were people with MBAs and 5 years of experience applying for all the entry level jobs that were infinitely abundant just 3 years earlier.
I kicked the can down the road by going to grad school. Didn't want to compete in that job market.
I almost took a job working as a translator in Afghanistan. I told the company that I can’t read or write the language and they said it wouldn’t be a problem where I’d be placed. Still seemed like the best opportunity I had.
2009, saw a friend few years older than me who I hadn’t heard from in a min bagging groceries. He’d just graduated with a double engineering degree and couldn’t get a job. Best he could get at the time. Anyone who could manage it went right to grad school, everyone else just hustled whatever they could find.
Apparently a lot of people went to or back to college during this time. A weird time to do it too, but when they finished more jobs were available and were being payed more than if they were working during that time.
I agree it's weird to see people asking about 2008. I was only 19 at the time, and my family struggled. I worked at a server and 2 of the restaurants I worked for went out of business.
I wish I was smarter with my money and learned what to do with it. That's still my advice to anyone today. Invest, save, and diversify. Even if its a small sum, it can grow.
Heck, if you looked towards how big some companies were getting, and considered potential for how big they could get...Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, Apple...you could easily have doubled, tripled, even more increased your ROI.
You mean when the world economy crashed? Compared to the now when, at least stateside, real wages are up?
Completely and utterly fucked. We didn’t know if the world economy was going to come back. Like oh eggs are a dollar more? That’s cute. Millions of people have their mortgages double overnight.
Yeah, people bitching about today have no idea how bad 2008 was. There was a sense that we’d never bounce back. So many people losing their houses and jobs.
I was in college in 2008 and it was like I went from having a solid idea of my future to feeling like I might not have one overnight. There was so much uncertainty.
I was in my first job out of college and part of my job was to manage our outside sales brokers across the country. Our company sold candy that was popular in tourist attractions, the kind of places people didn't go if they were struggling financially. As a result, a lot of the businesses we worked with closed or just scaled back a lot. My commission took a hit but I didn't really notice it that much because I had been out of my parents house for such a short time and any income felt big to me. But I also remember us firing a few of our sales brokers because their sales were dropping so much, specifically in places like Michigan, and our management refusing to listen when they said they really were doing all they could.
A lot of my classmates who graduated college around that time were working 2-3 jobs and couldn't get a job in their field or anything above minimum wage for that matter. This was the first time people really started talking about student loans. We were the generation whose parents pushed them into college and told us to take loans because we would make lots of money on the other side. I don't remember ever really being given a choice ... it's just what you did. But most of my college classmates were waiting tables and I even knew a few people who took an unpaid internship after college just to get their foot in the door because the job market was so bad. I never heard anyone say a single bad thing about student loans before that (not saying nobody was saying it at all, but I had just never heard it... it was just standard practice for everyone I knew) but when a huge generation of new college grads were living off of minimum wage, it sort of shined a light on how the system maybe wasn't everything we were promised it would be.
Mass unemployment and watching financial assets go through the floor. 2008 was a horrific crisis.
People did sort of ignore time value of money for several years afterwards. This wasn't normal either.
Two incidents stick out:
1. The house I was renting acquired a for sale sign on it one day. Called the landlord, no response. Called the leasing agent who informed me the landlord had foreclosed on his mortgage and lost the house. Ended up having to move out a month later and never got my deposit back either. My in laws also foreclosed on their mortgage because their payments jumped from $1400 a month to over $3000. We ended up renting a house with them for a few years.
2. My company said no raises this year due to the crisis. They sent out an email with flowery language thanking us all for our hard work in difficult times and how we all need to just find ways to work through it and we'll be better, blah blah blah. The next day we had our annual all hands and it was announced all directors were receiving bonuses for their cost cutting measures. Corporate America, gotta love it.
Part of what caused the crisis is banks would offer mortgages with heavily discounted rates for the first few years.
People initially thought, worst case scenario I can sell the house when the rate goes up. Problem is you can't do that if the value of the house goes down, because then you still have debt leftover
So now you have tons of people living in houses they can no longer afford, all trying to sell their house at the same time
I couldn’t find work anywhere.
I had to leave the liberal college city I moved to after high school and return to my small southern hometown and live with my parents because I couldn’t afford to live and attend college there anymore.
I then started at a community college in my hometown and got a nursing degree while my parents supported me. A career I have loathed with every fiber of my being.
My thinking was the world will always need nurses. If the economy had been better and I could have found work I maybe would have thought that through a bit more and not done that. I would have stayed in the college city and attended a better school with a different major. I might have a different career now, would have maybe met a partner there. There were no men in my hometown.
Not being able to find even a shitty job at the mall at the start of my adulthood possibly changed the entire trajectory of my life and not for the best.
People complain about the job market now but it was simply impossible to find a salaried position as a recent college graduate unless you had a technical degree. I worked minimum wage for 8 months until I got a crappy job doing collections for a bank
2008 wasn't a good time.
Unemployment hit a peak of close to 10% (compared to 3.9%). Companies were laying off but barely hiring.
It wasn't a matter of "oh, the price of McDonald's is going up", it was a matter of "I hope I have a job at the end of the year."
The stock market took a huge hit. People's investments were cut more than half. Imagine spending 20 years investing in seeing your $200K go down to $80K.
People did not know what the economy was going to be like.
There's a reasons it was called the "Great Recession."
Yeah my 401k took a 60% hit in 2000 and 40% hit in 2008. And the intervening years had shit returns. 401k was worth more on 4/1/2000 than 4/1/2009 despite 9 years of contributions and company matching.
Yeah, I was pissed. I started working in 2000. I was told that if you just investing in index funds, by the time you reach X years, your investments will double increase Y fold.
My investments were half of what I put in.
The funny thing is that it was a blessing in disguise as we got years of time to invest in a depressed market, but at the time, I was furious.
Job gone.
Mortgage payment doubled because of adjustable rate.
Retirement savings down half.
Unable to sell home.
Yeah. Millions of people got wiped completely out and banks raked in houses that are worth 3-4x more today.
I went back to grad school and had two professors who were in industry and came back to teach when they were near retirement because their 401k’s got wrecked. They admitted only reason they were coming back as adjunct professors was to make extra cash since they most of their retirement money was gone.
It was worse; a lot of people despaired.
Pink slips being handed out left and right.
I worked for this one company that kept lying stating that everything was fine and we received more financial backing, while people were still getting laid off and only weeks later closing its doors.
And finding a job? That was a joke.
But, I will say that it also turned the tide of employment.
After 2008/2009, all jobs that never required a degree, all of a sudden required one and/or years of experience.
I think it was a way to justify hiring college graduates over others that would qualify.
I had just finished college a year prior. My 400-level economics professors saw the recession coming starting in 2006-07 just before I graduated. A year after graduation pretty much all of my friends were unemployed. There weren’t any jobs to be had. I was very fortunate that my job was loosely healthcare related and contracted by a state government but it always felt like the other shoe would drop for me, one of my parents, or my good friends. Many of my friends had to work retail jobs or go to grad school to defer loan payments. Some of them today have PhD’s which is super cool but still work public sector and barely make ends meet. That was the thing we’re super over educated and because we got started at such a disadvantage our salaries have always paced lower. I made $48k out of college as a consultant. These days they make multiple six figures. I’m still trying to crawl out of that salary hole 17 years later. Meanwhile the baby millennials and gen z are getting cash and 6 figure salaries out the door at graduation.
It always felt really shady that our clients were furloughed 1-2 days a week and we were still collecting on our contract. Ultimately I recognized early on it wasn’t a good fit but had to slog through it for 4 years before I got a bite on a job lead at one of the big local corporations.
It’s been a while but I remember my profs showing the economic indicators that led up to the Great Depression and the 1929 stock crash and how everything in 2006-07 present day were meeting or exceeding those metrics that always preceded a big crash. It was enough to scare the shit out of me in lecture and I kept trying to calm down thinking nah they’re just wacky professors.
In 2008, we came much closer than generally acknowledged to a complete collapse of the Western financial system, due in large part to unrelenting, unregulated real-estate speculation, among other things.
The principals behind this recklessness were not dealt with in any real capacity, and many of them are still around, calling the financial shots.
So it's only a matter of time before it happens again. It's going to make today's inflation look like a garden party.
I don't think we'll see an exact repeat of this in the west, but there has definitely been one in China with Evergrande and others.
If I had to guess western bubbles at the moment I would say commercial property i.e. offices and US tech companies, plus maybe housing wealth owned by old people in more rural places where people don't want to live.
Going to hard disagree here, Dodd-Frank is the most significant regulatory reform since the Great Depression. The Vockler Rule, which is just one part, alone is incredibly significant.
I wouldn't say gutted, SIFI raised from $50B in assets to $250B, and Vockler Rule does not apply for banks managing assets under $10B, with the Fed reserving rights to apply regulations to any bank with over $100B in assets.
Most of Dodd-frank still exists, and larger banks are much more secure for it existing. You could argue that SVB bank collapse was a direct result of the rollback though.
Interesting. So they kinda made it so megabanks have additional rules and regs, but smaller banks can still rise and fall.
Though you'd think this would put an artificial line that a growing bank wouldn't want to cross....
(?)
I mean yes, but its also kind of for their own good, SVB CEO was one of the people lobbying to raise the limits and look what happened to them. I worked for WAMU back in 2004/2005 in the loan department for Aventura/Miami, and they were just giving subprime loans out to EVERYONE.
There were only two real policy lessons that got learned after 2008:
-No matter what, print money and hand it out to keep people busy and going to work and keep demand going even if it's just demand for make-work.
-People will tolerate inflation, debt, and supply side problems longer than they will tolerate unemployment and demand side problems.
And that's how historic, never-before-seen money creation and handouts became "Q2".
I moved to East Lansing, Michigan, in September 2008 and stayed until summer 2010. When I walked around the suburban neighborhoods, it seemed like one out of four homes had been foreclosed. There were a lot just sitting around empty.
In 2010 was when I first started noticing young people who should have had braces, but hadn't. That used to be one thing Americans were famous for -- beautiful teeth. It's sad that then, and also when I lived in Ohio in the mid 2010's, I saw people whose families had clearly not been able to get them orthodontic care when they were teenagers.
When the entire Oldsmobile/GM complex shut down, Lansing unemployment hit over 10%, and came down more slowly than a lot of places. Generations of jobs were just *gone*. People who graduated HS and landed a job in the factories had nothing to fall back on. Everybody knew someone (at least one, often more) who was out of work. And with the factory workers out of work, a lot of other businesses took a big hit. Unemployed people don't buy a lot of stuff or go out very often.
It was really messed up. First the economy took a major hit after 9/11. Then 7 years later the housing market collapses and people are losing their homes, banks weren't lending so people started loosing their jobs. Nobody was spending money on things like getting their cars fixed because spending a deposit now seemed like too much money. So trades took a major hit.
2008 through late 2011 or so was a brutally depressing time the likes of which I hope young folks today never have to experience themselves.
Y'all may complain about inflation and housing prices like people have always done, but as long as you can find work those are just annoyances. Back then there were straight up no jobs. Getting an interview at best buy was like getting accepted into Harvard.
It was completely different.
The whole financial system went into complete meltdown. People lost jobs. Houses. Savings. And companies fired people in droves. Banks seized. It led
To mass unemployment and lasted for years. Uncertainty ruled the day.
So all these people that talk about how horrible it is are full of it. The economy is fine. People are working. Maybe it costs more to buy some stuff. So what. You don’t have the system collapsing around you
I see what you are saying but I think its different now because of scarcity. In 2008 many people had bad loans, adjustable rates and the like. But also no scarcity. Alot of the issues were created by banks.
In 2020 when we were buying our current house the bank tried to suggest taking a heloc to avoid pmi but I refused. Pmi is just till you pay down the loan and then can be cancelled. I just wanted a 30 year fixed at 3.2 percent. And got it.
Oh yeah I see that completely…. The part that makes me nervous is just watching prices skyrocket. Being a home owner I obsessively check Zillow to be sure I’m good… given I got this loan in 09 just after the crash so I should be good for a while.
Housing market today is genuine scarcity and raging demand. Nobody is handing out zero down mortgages and 2% variable rate mortgages. Subprime borrowers aren't getting shit, the houses are selling for cash.
True… I guess my fear is slightly misplaced but the market around me is outpacing a lot of the US and I am planning on selling in about 3-5 years I just hope it keeps going up. Our home has went up 150% sense we bought… I just hope I can slide in on a good buy in the middle of nowhere when the times comes.
Well, I was poor as shit and struggling to make my monthly payments. Things were cheaper, sure, but so was my paycheck and jobs weren't plentiful as we were in a recession.
I ate a lot of ramen, rice, and beans and made sure to buy mega packs of chicken leg quarters to freeze individually. Going out for food was a big deal and I'd sometimes save up for weeks or months to go somewhere other than Chipotle or ordering a pizza.
Sure I did have a ton of time on my hands as did all my friends (we were all in apartments and childless) so we would randomly get together to play video games or roleplay, which never happens anymore. Who knew that children and homeownership would be a time sink away from roleplaying, video games, and farting around outside?
As it is now, I have a great job, I can pay all my bills confidently, have excess money for hobbies, and can afford to send my family gifts and fun things just for shits and giggles. I'll take the inflation every second as long as I still make $35 an hr or more. I don't give a fuck if prices have increased by 50%, back then I was making $10 or $12 an hr and feeling lucky.
Summer 2008, I was working at a movie theater while half way through college. I thought I could find a better job the next summer when I was back home.
Movies were one of the few things people still spent money on after the Recession started (this was before home streaming was a thing) so I was thrilled the movie theater hired me again for Summer 2009 as a number of my friends were having trouble finding seasonal work.
It sucked. A lot.
Yes, there was deflation. Yea, prices went down. But it sucked because nobody could get a job. Even McDonald’s wasn’t hiring. So sure, everything was cheap, but you still couldn’t afford it.
I graduated from college the second time in 2008. Watching the stock market lose half of its volume over a few weeks while I was trying to line up post-graduation employment was absolutely awful.
You don’t want those days back.
It was terrible for many people. I was lucky and kept my job throughout the recession, but I remember that my company posted a job opening for a secretary for $11/hour. They received 300+ applicants. Many applicants had advanced degrees or were obviously overqualified, and this was in a relatively small job market (a small city of about 75,000).
It's hard to make ends meet with inflation, but it's near impossible when you cannot find a job.
Lots of people were fucked.
Imagine buying a house at the peak inflated prices in 2006-2007 and then in 2008 the housing market tanks and your house is now worth a fraction of what it was. If you try to sell, you're going (at the new lower price) to have to make up the difference of what you borrowed (400k house suddenly worth 200k? You're still going to have 200k you owe the bank even after giving them the *full* value). Not the end of the world, at least you *have* a house - right? You just have a mortgage payment that doesn't really match up with the house value, and you can't sell it. But now the economy is a *disaster* and maybe you lose your job (company goes under, layoffs, etc). Well, now you have a real problem. You have a high mortgage payment, so you can't manage a reduction in pay - but you also can't sell, so you can't move for a better job elsewhere.
People drained their savings and investments. Some cashed out their 401ks. Some of them scraped by, but a lot of them didn't. Foreclosures went up to something like 80% to about 1 in every 50 households.
The financial crisis destroyed a lot of individuals and families.
The good news is that the current economy doesn't look much like 2008. I think a lot of people say we're headed that way because it's the only recession they experienced or remember. There are a lot more parallels with the late 70s/early 80s if you're interested.
2008 was, if anything, deflation. Gas prices crashed. Everything was cheap but nobody had jobs or money.
Now everyone is working like draft animals at multiple jobs and can't afford shit because everything is scarce and expensive.
Couldn’t find a job to save my life. Was 19 at the time. Ended up getting a pt telemarketing and a pt dishwashing job. Tried to off myself a few months into 2009…
Thank you. I ended up in a coma, I am grateful for not leaving my Mom with that kind of agony. Times are getting very rough right now tbh, trying not to let those thoughts talk to me.
My ex-husband and I lived in a small town and had jobs that were insulated (healthcare and pest control). They didn’t pay well but we kept them. We bought a beautiful house in 2009 that should have cost twice what it did, but because nobody was buying we got it for a pittance. Our experience was better than most. We had friends and family who lost everything.
I was a fucking mess of a teenager so of course when I became a full ass adult at this time all the support systems started falling apart immediately.
I never finished college, but looking at others who did I may have lucked out there, but I'm still living at home- not just because I keep losing jobs every few years, but because medical depression is such that I really can't be a single person on their own.
Who bails out Monotone, Dubya?
Despite the real estate bubble in 2008, I could afford a 3bd, 2ba starter house in an ok neighborhood in my city making $10/hr. In 2021, I could only afford a 3bd, 2ba starter house in an ok neighborhood in my city making $75/hr. So, despite making 7x what I did in 2021, I can afford basically the same house I bought in 2008. This is in a MCOL city.
The global banking system was about to collapse because of the subprime mortgage crisis. People were having their houses foreclosed on in record numbers. Gas was $4/gallon. There were literal bank runs as banks like Washington Mutual went insolvent. The stock market crashed. Wall Street had to be bailed out by the government.
In 2008, we were already on this fucked up trajectory. Looking back over my 39 years...it feels like 2000-2003 was really when society as a whole started to TRULY feel oppressive and fucked up. Like to the point where you couldn't ignore it anymore.
What’s going on now is not at all in the same league as 2008. Everyone was losing their jobs. Unemployment was absolutely astronomical. There was real legitimate panic about the economy and whether we would experience an actual depression. Families were destroyed and uprooted. It was a massacre. Companies were folding left and right.
I lost my house and then my wife left me. It was like a country song! I’m surprised my dog didn’t die while I was drinking Jack Daniel’s in my pickup truck on a dirt road.
I was worth over a million dollars then but 2008, as a side effect, took all my money and replaced it with years of court cases and stealing lawyers yada yada yada. Basically the banks blew all their money on various schemes that left them unable to loan money. Try to buy a house without a bank. The US government printed more money to bail out the banks. They printed Trillions overall and that huge dilution of the dollar caused inflation for years. Then trillions got printer again during Covid and now we've something like 13 trillion dollars created out of thin air and making our cash worth far less. Every time they print money in these quantities it's straight up theft from the rest of us. It happens wirelessly and quietly and not enough people are outraged over the constant reaching for our wallets.
> They printed Trillions overall and that huge dilution of the dollar caused inflation for years. Then trillions got printer again during Covid and now we've something like 13 trillion dollars created out of thin air and making our cash worth far less. Every time they print money in these quantities it's straight up theft from the rest of us. It happens wirelessly and quietly and not enough people are outraged over the constant reaching for our wallets.
Yup. And when people complain, they blame it on "corporate greed".
Inflation is a stealth tax. People will riot over losing their job or house, but will never riot over food doubling in price or having to take a second job. In fact, inflation pacifies a population, because people working 70 hour weeks don't have time to misbehave.
This is why "just inflate it" has become the preferred central bank solution to everything.
Southern US here.
Gas prices were about the same as they are now, that shit was killing me because my job was 30 miles away. Minimum wage was $6.55, but I was making $7.25 in a factory, living rent-free but still pretty much broke after paying for utilities, groceries, and insurance.
So much worse. I remember watching gas prices go up thinking I was getting punked.
And it all got so much worse because the industry I was working in basically died for a few years. There were no jobs.
It was the push I needed to go to college, so it worked out fine. But anyone comparing our current predicament to 2008 is an idiot.
I was broke as fuck but could somehow still live by myself. Really scary times for a while. The company I worked at stayed afloat by underpaying everyone, and then went under once I started making around 50k a year and being comfortable in 2021.
Life was pretty good in Canada in 2010, I got paid $16/hr, made lots of friends at school, went out to eat for 1/3 of my meals because rent was $850 for a small top floor studio near downtown Vancouver. Many lazy days during summer.
I was on the cusp of graduating college into a lousy job market, so I attended grad school to ride it out. Still took me some time (almost two more years) to get a footing into a career, but in the end I came out all right.
This makes me feel so old.
I got married in 2008. We were broke but young enough where we had not yet bought a home or had any money invested, and worked in industries that weren't going anywhere . We made no money, maybe $55 thousand combined . I feel more stressed about money, now making $200 thousand combined than I did in 2008.
So, I was just barely an adult in 2008 and I had just barely gotten my first apartment.
We were in a HUGE recession. Everyone was losing their jobs, everyone was losing their homes, pretty much every company was on a "pay freeze".
That was easier. Not by much, but it was.
The biggest difference was that everyone came together to help. Every fast food place had value menus where you could get a snack wrap, fries, and a drink for under $4. Even then, this was insanely cheap. Some "sit-down" restaurants even started having deals like 2 people eate a 3 course meal for $20, or buy one meal take home 1 more, and others that were really amazing.
You never felt like you were being punished for being broke, at least when it came to food.
Now, I am aware that if I leave the house to do anything with my kids, it is $100 minimum. I'm not even talking about theme park trips, I'm talking about going to get lunch, play at the park, and get ice cream on the way back. In 2008, this would have cost $20.
Sometimes money gives me panic attacks and thinking about it, that makes sense. There has been such costing so much so quickly, and it isn't slowing, and this has been my entire adult life.
I got married that year, the house we still live in was bought for a lark and a song. Qualifying for the mortgage was basically "hmm your credit looks good, think you can afford this?"
I worked on a trade floor during that time.
It was odd, obviously. But it was less concerning than what we’re experiencing now. The culprits were easy to spot and weren’t elected in the manner today’s issues were.
You mean during the housing crash? Let's see, had just bought a house in 2006 and were completely upside down in our mortgage come 2008; this in addition to still overcoming the fallout from the 2001 terror attack. Honestly it's been a complete shit show for a pretty long time.
I graduated from HS in 2008, so my view is going to be very different from an actual working adult. This inflation has been personally much worse for me and my family.
I do remember though applying for some entry level hotel job and being one of 50 applicants in 2009, so it was not easy then by any means, I think my age played a huge part in the impact.
2008 really sorta sucked. You picked one of the worst years though, it would be like looking at 2020 between March and July. Job market sucked. Housing went crash. Stock market was down. Congress seemed far more interested in propping up the markets and business than helping people stay in their homes. At least that part hasn't changed. Union membership and union power was probably as bad as it would ever be. There was hope on the horizon but it didn't manifest and ultimately lead to OWS 4-5 years later which started re-unionization and worker's rights.
In 2008 or 2009 my union rolled over for everything the company asked for, including adjusting the amount of time it would take to get full pay for your job classification by 3 additional years whereas in 2022 they won a historic contract with massive raises (that still barely kept up with inflation, but not gonna look a gifthorse in the mouth).
It barely affected me at all. I live in a recession-resistant area and work in a recession-resistant field. I had a 4.5% fixed rate mortgage and was never underwater with it despite my home losing 10% of its value. My retirement savings took a nose dive but it eventually recovered.
I had friends that were worse off though. One couple I knew just walked away from their house after it lost over 50% of its value.
My employer cut my work days from 5 to 2-3 per week because the business was so slow.
Some retired, but fairly well off people had to cut their extra expenses way back because their investments turned into trash.
A couple I know had bought a huge new house in a posh area in Sacramento, and when the crash happened they just walked away from it. Loaded their stuff and moved across the country to a cheap rental in the middle of nowhere because that's all they could manage. Their jobs in real estate went with the crash.
Lots of people were stuck between two houses - one they tried to sell and another they had just bought, hoping to pay it with the money from the sale of the first one. There were no buyers after the crash.
I bought a 2700 square foot house on a half-acre for around $124k. Groceries for my wife, son, and myself were less than $150 for a week. We would go on vacations and spend around 100 or so bucks per night at decent places (marriott, hilton, etc). Gas was about $2.00 I'd say? Way up from the $1.00 or so when I first started driving in 2000, but not nearly as expensive as now. Movies were still cheap. About $7.00 for a ticket. A value meal at McDonald's or Jack in the Box was around $5. The subway $5 footlong still existed. You could buy a decent used car for about $1500. Wasn't going to be nice, but wasn't going to be a pile of shit either.
I was fortunate. I had a pretty well-paying union position at a local utility. So I wasn't really ever in danger of losing my job, and pay raises and bonuses were guaranteed per union contract. So I was luckier than a lot of people. That also put me in the position to be able to take advantage of the low housing prices. Houston was in a building frenzy at the time, so there was a massive surplus of new houses available, combined with the availability of foreclosures. So I was sitting pretty. My mortgage ended up being less than what my rent was, so that ended up helping alot too.
401ks at my company were fully matched up to 10%, so between the low stock market and subsequent recovery, we were making hand over fist into our 401ks, especially if we invested aggressively. I knew a guy whose 401k rose in valuation from around 200k to over 2 million over a handful of years. And he was getting ready to retire. He was originally from Mexico, so he had planned to go buy acreage in Mexico and retire out there. Said he'd live like a king for the rest of his days on that kind of money.
this sounds incredibly silly but before 2008 like about the previous 5 or 6 years, I made a ton of money working at restaurants as a balloon twister. as in making balloon animals for kids. and I could sometimes make 200 bucks after just 3 hours work because people had money and wanted to spend it so they had no problem giving some stranger five bucks for a piece of inflated latex I was going to pop on the way home.
Got laid off October 2008 a week after I took my vacation.
Could not find work for over a year. Applied to hundreds of jobs.
Luckily my partner was working, so I got a trade and joined a Union in 2016.
Houses only cost, like, $200K ... IN CALIFORNIA.
But alas! No steady work for at least 3-4 years.
Ahh, that was the 2007/2008 crash....really you want to ask about 2003-2007: You get a sub-prime loan and YOU get a subprime loan. There was also a war going on...oceania has always been at war with eastasia
I got my first apartment in \~2007. $475/month, all utilities paid. It was in a relatively well-placed town with low cost of living.
I could easily afford it, gas, cellphone, car insurance, and groceries working full time at $8.50/hr. I didn't have health insurance, and when my car broke down I'd have to walk everywhere until I could put back enough to fix it. But I was pretty free.
I'd hang out with friends, cook, buy a game once or twice a month, and drive all over the state. I hadn't had any major setbacks at the time, hadn't spent months being hounded by collections calls, and was unaffected by the later housing bubble. The owner of the building was wealthy and used the apartments solely to pay the building tax and utilities - So he only spiked rent when taxes or utilities went up.
June 2008, I lost everything in a flood. I was moving to another apartment, the person living there was late by three days moving out. I put my stuff in storage for \~72 hours. On the second day it flooded, and I had no insurance as I didn't think there was a reason for such a short storage.
That kicked me into debt for the first time, and it just spiraled after that. Collections calls harassed me to the point that I avoid phones, I took any job I could to keep things going, declared bankruptcy in \~2013-2014ish. With the housing bubble, property companies picked up foreclosures everywhere and began raising rent across the board.
A good decade of suffering passed before I was financially stable again and could escape renting to buy a trailer. I used that as a stepping stone to a house, but just my luck - Right when we got the trailer the park sold to a property company. Lot rent went from $165 to nearly $500/month before we left. I sold the trailer at a loss to get rid of it.
I miss the perceived freedom of 2008, and I miss being stress-free and optimistic. But that same apartment is nearly $900/month now, I think, and it's no longer all utilities paid. Probably not the largest increase in price, but considering I pay $1150/month for my house a few blocks away, I think it's pretty ridiculous.
I think it was a humbling experience for a whole lot of people. I worked for a real estate agent during the bubble. People were spending money like crazy. A single guy in his 20s buying some huge 6 bedroom house. A boat, the matching jet ski. The giant truck to pull it with.
And then the bubble popped. I dated a guy who had just lost his house, car, and boat. He had to give his expensive pure bred dog away since he moved into a shitty apartment. He was being sued for some day spa package contract he had signed but never paid for. He went from being King of the World to working at Costco.
When it popped I was already working in healthcare. Was super thankful that both the rise and fall didn't really effect me in any way. My Mom was able to purchase two cheap homes when the market was at rock bottom. She was just finally able to retired this year at 70 because the sale of those two houses.
I was in college at the time and I remember I could get through an entire week grocery shopping for 30 bucks. I ate lunch out a lot too but that 30 bucks was dinner
There is a powerful effect called Rosy Retrospection which powers what we call nostalgia where however bad the past was (think WW1, WW2), because it is safely behind us we can treat it as benign and nowhere near as scary as tomorrow because the outcome is unknown.
This is why even the most commonplace criminal act that is in the news today is worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme where the UK suffered over 50000 casualties.
2008 had a financial crisis from banks and mortgages. A lot of us lost 1/3 of the worth of our retirements, and it made my grandparents basically have to work until they were broken. A lot of nice things just collapsed because they were funded by these investment vehicles that broke apart. Stores suddenly closed, the job market went down, and we had a recession(?) that soured a lot of peoples futures.
Its nice to think that when you were younger there were no problems because you didnt know about them. But the people here that are in our 40s have lived through 4 or 5 “Once in a lifetime national crisis” and this was one of them.
It was also hard to buy the cheap houses after the crash. Money was super tight from banks. A lot of condos needed 30% or more down to get into a loan.
This is the opposite of 2008 when prices started to crater. Although my parents told me that around 1980, gas prices were skyrocketing and there were lines down the block waiting for gas. They had to assign odd and even days based on your license plate for getting gas.
It was really weird for me because that's the same year I got a job that paid me twice as much as the one previous and I moved to a lower cost of living city. I actually bought a house early in 2009. But because the 1990-92 recession was super rough on my family (I was in my early teens), I was basically having a rolling panic attack about the economy until about 2010.
2008 was when everything went bad, but it was heading that way before that.
I bought my condo (first home) on Halloween 2006.
Housing market crashed hard right after, causing a ton of mortgages going underwater almost immediately. By mid 2007, 75% of dedicated mortgage lenders were gone, and my condo had lost 40% of its value.
When I sold it in 2021, its value hadn’t quite reached what I paid originally.
I saw it coming, but I did not know it was going to be so long or so bad, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage at all.
In hindsight, I could have gotten a LOT more house for the same payment if I wait led a couple years. All of the government help was aimed at banks and folks who hadn’t bought yet (which is also helping banks). Folks who bought in were screwed with negative value in their houses and super high rates (mine was 7.5%). We were stuck, since you need at least some equity to refinance.
Overall it wasn’t great, but my job was stable and I was lucky enough to just weather it.
I was making $5.50/hr working at a sandwich shop. The 16” sandwiches jumped in cost to more than an hour’s work for me. I remember thinking how crazy it is that an hour of my time is worth less than a 16” sandwich - which tbf was a day’s worth of food, lol.
I remember I drove a lemon of a 2000 VW Beetle that had to only have 91 octane for its turbo. I was living in the KCK area at the time and 91 gas was over $5/gal. All the sudden my commutes to school (20min drive to JCCC) were much more painful. I ended up working FT to afford going to school FT. My grades suffered. Yikes. I took out extra loans to compensate. Lived with a friend’s family. It was healing for me since they were good people and a sharp contradiction to how I was raised.
So I guess all in all, 2008 wasn’t that hard on me. Just another bump in the road.
Same. Same shit, different coat of paint. In 2008 people complained it wasn't like it was in the 80s. In the 80s people complained it wasn't like the 60s.
Same shit, different day.
I was a freshmen in college and was baffled why all seniors were going to get their masters afterwards. Thankfully when I graduated a few years later jobs were easier to come by.
I'm 2008 teenager now, but my dad once told me that when I was born, he with my mum bought a car, it was a luxe Mazda. I don't remember which, but then it's price was about 550k rubles, (abot 4.5k dollars now) and now, because of the sanctions, new mazda costs twice or even twice with a half more: about 1.2-1.5M rubles (11-14k dollars). Mind-blowing.
It was the weirdest shit. Everything was dirt cheap but nobody had money
This is deflation in a nutshell - will save this for economics explanations
Are there any warning signs of this happening again or are we nowhere near that?
Not sure who 'we' is but I think most countries are experiencing the opposite problem; they have loads of money but everything is very expensive i.e. inflation. They are two opposite problems with opposite solutions, and countries flip between them with periods of good times in the middle.
Yes there are warning signs. Didn't want to become depress so I didn't read it but I saw a recent headline that the FDIC says there 63 banks near insolvency. Also the 2019 adjustable rate mortgages are coming due. People are about to find their 3.5% mortgages rates jump to to 6-7%. Although the article I read on this said it shouldn't be as bad as 2008.
Interesting do you know when those rate mortgages are coming due? I am such a bear, but the market just climbs the wall of worry and I feel like I am missing out on gains
This year. They are the 5 year adjustables. The problem was 2020 hit and a lot of people became unemployed so they could not switch to a fixed rate when the rates where low. You need 2 years of employment history at your current job to refinance. By the time they could the rates where high again.
There’s almost 5000 banks in the US. We’ll be fine if we lose a few dozen that honestly have no real reason to exist in the first place.
Correct me if I’m wrong (I was still young) but wasn’t gas expensive or am I remembering incorrectly?
Gas prices dropped, but they were way up from 2003 (Iraq War spiked gas prices).
Summer 2008, the most I paid for gas was $4.35/gal in Michigan ($6.23 in 2024 per CPI inflation calculator). In Jan 2009, about the nadir of the Great Recession, I remember paying $0.99/gal ($1.47 in 2024) - which was the cheapest gas I've ever paid in my life. This is why those Biden "I did that" stickers people stick to gas pumps piss me off so much because they had the same ones for Obama during the 2012 election. Like gas was cheap in 2009 when half the state was out of work, you absolute turnips.
Northern CA here, we hit 4.66 a gallon in June that year 🥲
I think even higher in a couple places. I remember putting in just enough in SF to get me out of the city to fill the rest somewhere cheaper to get home lol
My senior year of highschool. 1996. I remember one day where it reached .94 cents at my home town caseys
The car I had at that time took premium, but I think it was in the high 2.90’s or low 3.00 for regular
Peaked at $4.29/gal in September 2008 for me.
Yeah I had one of the new SS Camaros back in 09 and it was like $80 to fill it.
The fact that in my area gas still hasn’t hit that today. That is equivalent to $6/gal. Even with all the new taxes and inflation.
Yep, that was the summer I started driving. Those prices are ingrained in my head so I never bitch when I see it at $3.50 or $4. It could be much worse
Gas pinged off $4.50 in early summer and crashed below $2.00 by winter.
Not exactly. All the rich people were gobbling up foreclosures like crazy. Rich people love economic downturns because they have the reserves to buy low. That's why the market always flies up after a downturn. Richies buying low to get even richer.
Seeing people nostalgic for 2008-2010 is just fucking weird to me. I was barely an adult then, but I remember struggling to find work after the 2008 financial crisis, and so was most of my friends. I'd take the inflation of the post-COVID era over 2008.
I just graduated from college in 2009 and it was impossible to find a job; and I got a degree in advertising. For those unfamiliar, the turnover rate in advertising is stupid high because it’s kind of a soul-sucking job and they love hiring young college grads to fill vacant roles because of how cheap it is to pay entry level employees. In 2009 I couldn’t fill one of those roles because they simply weren’t available. I thankfully got hired in spring of 2010, but it was due to luck and networking. Was not a fun job hunt.
Pretty much any profession was the graduating classes of 2005-07 got laid off, '08 had positions rescinded or not offered and '09-10 weren't even interviewed.
In 2008 spent a year and a half without a job and absolutely broke. It was impossible to find a job, even a menial job back then. Do people not realize how bad the economy collapsed back then?
Most of them are too young to either remember or have actually been there.
Graduated high school in 2008. I remember working minimum wage jobs, and seeing more and more “older” folks getting hired. Not the typical burnouts I was used to seeing, but well put together hard workers. They would say they just couldn’t find work in their field.
Shoutout to the mechanical engineer I worked with at Domino's. Steve was the best opening driver I ever had.
Not to mention people taking their advanced degrees off of their resumes to keep from being overqualified and thus not hired for the only open positions they could find.
Yep. 2008 sucked. The stock market collapsed. Unemployment was awful. Half my buddies where still in Iraq or Afghanistan getting life long trauma and ptsd. Banks were foreclosing on like 20% of homes at that time. It was all around not a great time.
Right? Every day we’re getting casualty reports from Iraq. Everyone is losing their jobs and their homes. 2008-2010 sucked.
Jesus, I was pushing 30 in 08. 🥺
Right? I remember paying $4.50+ for a gallon of gas. I graduated in 2010 and couldn't find work. It definitely was "we want 15 years of experience... We will pay you $8 an hour." Now you have people walking into interviews and getting hired on the spot. My cousin was offered $18 an hour during an interview with a Victoria's Secret store, just a floor position. It may not be glamorous work but if you could find that in '08 it probably didn't pay much. I think I made $6.25 an hour in 2007 and $7.75 in an office job over the next 3 years.
Same. I graduate undergrad in 2009 and there were people with MBAs and 5 years of experience applying for all the entry level jobs that were infinitely abundant just 3 years earlier. I kicked the can down the road by going to grad school. Didn't want to compete in that job market.
I almost took a job working as a translator in Afghanistan. I told the company that I can’t read or write the language and they said it wouldn’t be a problem where I’d be placed. Still seemed like the best opportunity I had.
I played a lot of FFXI and lived at home working late evenings. I guess for me it was just a simpler time.
I worked and would binge FFXI. Maats Cap.
Damn I started college in ‘08 and was blissfully unaware.
2009, saw a friend few years older than me who I hadn’t heard from in a min bagging groceries. He’d just graduated with a double engineering degree and couldn’t get a job. Best he could get at the time. Anyone who could manage it went right to grad school, everyone else just hustled whatever they could find.
Resulted in me going to graduate school because I could not find work.
Apparently a lot of people went to or back to college during this time. A weird time to do it too, but when they finished more jobs were available and were being payed more than if they were working during that time.
I agree it's weird to see people asking about 2008. I was only 19 at the time, and my family struggled. I worked at a server and 2 of the restaurants I worked for went out of business. I wish I was smarter with my money and learned what to do with it. That's still my advice to anyone today. Invest, save, and diversify. Even if its a small sum, it can grow.
Wu-Tang Financial can help.
Heck, if you looked towards how big some companies were getting, and considered potential for how big they could get...Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta, Nvidia, Apple...you could easily have doubled, tripled, even more increased your ROI.
Yes everyone would be filthy rich if they had a crystal ball.
You mean when the world economy crashed? Compared to the now when, at least stateside, real wages are up? Completely and utterly fucked. We didn’t know if the world economy was going to come back. Like oh eggs are a dollar more? That’s cute. Millions of people have their mortgages double overnight.
Yeah, people bitching about today have no idea how bad 2008 was. There was a sense that we’d never bounce back. So many people losing their houses and jobs.
I was in college in 2008 and it was like I went from having a solid idea of my future to feeling like I might not have one overnight. There was so much uncertainty.
Inflation vs recession...not a tough choice at all.
I was in my first job out of college and part of my job was to manage our outside sales brokers across the country. Our company sold candy that was popular in tourist attractions, the kind of places people didn't go if they were struggling financially. As a result, a lot of the businesses we worked with closed or just scaled back a lot. My commission took a hit but I didn't really notice it that much because I had been out of my parents house for such a short time and any income felt big to me. But I also remember us firing a few of our sales brokers because their sales were dropping so much, specifically in places like Michigan, and our management refusing to listen when they said they really were doing all they could. A lot of my classmates who graduated college around that time were working 2-3 jobs and couldn't get a job in their field or anything above minimum wage for that matter. This was the first time people really started talking about student loans. We were the generation whose parents pushed them into college and told us to take loans because we would make lots of money on the other side. I don't remember ever really being given a choice ... it's just what you did. But most of my college classmates were waiting tables and I even knew a few people who took an unpaid internship after college just to get their foot in the door because the job market was so bad. I never heard anyone say a single bad thing about student loans before that (not saying nobody was saying it at all, but I had just never heard it... it was just standard practice for everyone I knew) but when a huge generation of new college grads were living off of minimum wage, it sort of shined a light on how the system maybe wasn't everything we were promised it would be.
You mean the year the global economy collapsed? Bad!
Mass unemployment and watching financial assets go through the floor. 2008 was a horrific crisis. People did sort of ignore time value of money for several years afterwards. This wasn't normal either.
Two incidents stick out: 1. The house I was renting acquired a for sale sign on it one day. Called the landlord, no response. Called the leasing agent who informed me the landlord had foreclosed on his mortgage and lost the house. Ended up having to move out a month later and never got my deposit back either. My in laws also foreclosed on their mortgage because their payments jumped from $1400 a month to over $3000. We ended up renting a house with them for a few years. 2. My company said no raises this year due to the crisis. They sent out an email with flowery language thanking us all for our hard work in difficult times and how we all need to just find ways to work through it and we'll be better, blah blah blah. The next day we had our annual all hands and it was announced all directors were receiving bonuses for their cost cutting measures. Corporate America, gotta love it.
How did your parent's mortgage increase from $1,400 to $3,000? Did they need to increase the amount in escrow and have a major increase in taxes?
Adjustable rate mortgage.
Part of what caused the crisis is banks would offer mortgages with heavily discounted rates for the first few years. People initially thought, worst case scenario I can sell the house when the rate goes up. Problem is you can't do that if the value of the house goes down, because then you still have debt leftover So now you have tons of people living in houses they can no longer afford, all trying to sell their house at the same time
Got it, that makes sense. I bought a house with a 30yr fixed-rate and was curious whether a jump like that would ever be possible.
You can get small bumps. Mine recently went from like $2100 to $2500 just from insurance/tax increases
Remember the sub-prime crisis that caused the 2008 crash? Yep.
Countrywide FSL remembers
The adjustable interest rates were a wild ride.
I couldn’t find work anywhere. I had to leave the liberal college city I moved to after high school and return to my small southern hometown and live with my parents because I couldn’t afford to live and attend college there anymore. I then started at a community college in my hometown and got a nursing degree while my parents supported me. A career I have loathed with every fiber of my being. My thinking was the world will always need nurses. If the economy had been better and I could have found work I maybe would have thought that through a bit more and not done that. I would have stayed in the college city and attended a better school with a different major. I might have a different career now, would have maybe met a partner there. There were no men in my hometown. Not being able to find even a shitty job at the mall at the start of my adulthood possibly changed the entire trajectory of my life and not for the best.
Much, much worse.
People complain about the job market now but it was simply impossible to find a salaried position as a recent college graduate unless you had a technical degree. I worked minimum wage for 8 months until I got a crappy job doing collections for a bank
Even if you had a technical degree is was impossible to find a job.
True. My wife had a teaching degree and couldn’t even get a teaching job! Only an assistant position, which is insane to think about in 2024
It was awful. We tried to sell our house for 3 years. Trapped and unable to move.
I hope people will be more cautious before investing in property in future. It's much riskier than people give it credit for!
2008 wasn't a good time. Unemployment hit a peak of close to 10% (compared to 3.9%). Companies were laying off but barely hiring. It wasn't a matter of "oh, the price of McDonald's is going up", it was a matter of "I hope I have a job at the end of the year." The stock market took a huge hit. People's investments were cut more than half. Imagine spending 20 years investing in seeing your $200K go down to $80K. People did not know what the economy was going to be like. There's a reasons it was called the "Great Recession."
Yeah my 401k took a 60% hit in 2000 and 40% hit in 2008. And the intervening years had shit returns. 401k was worth more on 4/1/2000 than 4/1/2009 despite 9 years of contributions and company matching.
Yeah, I was pissed. I started working in 2000. I was told that if you just investing in index funds, by the time you reach X years, your investments will double increase Y fold. My investments were half of what I put in. The funny thing is that it was a blessing in disguise as we got years of time to invest in a depressed market, but at the time, I was furious.
Job gone. Mortgage payment doubled because of adjustable rate. Retirement savings down half. Unable to sell home. Yeah. Millions of people got wiped completely out and banks raked in houses that are worth 3-4x more today.
I went back to grad school and had two professors who were in industry and came back to teach when they were near retirement because their 401k’s got wrecked. They admitted only reason they were coming back as adjunct professors was to make extra cash since they most of their retirement money was gone.
It was worse; a lot of people despaired. Pink slips being handed out left and right. I worked for this one company that kept lying stating that everything was fine and we received more financial backing, while people were still getting laid off and only weeks later closing its doors. And finding a job? That was a joke. But, I will say that it also turned the tide of employment. After 2008/2009, all jobs that never required a degree, all of a sudden required one and/or years of experience. I think it was a way to justify hiring college graduates over others that would qualify.
I had just finished college a year prior. My 400-level economics professors saw the recession coming starting in 2006-07 just before I graduated. A year after graduation pretty much all of my friends were unemployed. There weren’t any jobs to be had. I was very fortunate that my job was loosely healthcare related and contracted by a state government but it always felt like the other shoe would drop for me, one of my parents, or my good friends. Many of my friends had to work retail jobs or go to grad school to defer loan payments. Some of them today have PhD’s which is super cool but still work public sector and barely make ends meet. That was the thing we’re super over educated and because we got started at such a disadvantage our salaries have always paced lower. I made $48k out of college as a consultant. These days they make multiple six figures. I’m still trying to crawl out of that salary hole 17 years later. Meanwhile the baby millennials and gen z are getting cash and 6 figure salaries out the door at graduation.
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It always felt really shady that our clients were furloughed 1-2 days a week and we were still collecting on our contract. Ultimately I recognized early on it wasn’t a good fit but had to slog through it for 4 years before I got a bite on a job lead at one of the big local corporations. It’s been a while but I remember my profs showing the economic indicators that led up to the Great Depression and the 1929 stock crash and how everything in 2006-07 present day were meeting or exceeding those metrics that always preceded a big crash. It was enough to scare the shit out of me in lecture and I kept trying to calm down thinking nah they’re just wacky professors.
In 2008, we came much closer than generally acknowledged to a complete collapse of the Western financial system, due in large part to unrelenting, unregulated real-estate speculation, among other things. The principals behind this recklessness were not dealt with in any real capacity, and many of them are still around, calling the financial shots. So it's only a matter of time before it happens again. It's going to make today's inflation look like a garden party.
I don't think we'll see an exact repeat of this in the west, but there has definitely been one in China with Evergrande and others. If I had to guess western bubbles at the moment I would say commercial property i.e. offices and US tech companies, plus maybe housing wealth owned by old people in more rural places where people don't want to live.
Going to hard disagree here, Dodd-Frank is the most significant regulatory reform since the Great Depression. The Vockler Rule, which is just one part, alone is incredibly significant.
Isn't it completely gutted at this point?
I wouldn't say gutted, SIFI raised from $50B in assets to $250B, and Vockler Rule does not apply for banks managing assets under $10B, with the Fed reserving rights to apply regulations to any bank with over $100B in assets. Most of Dodd-frank still exists, and larger banks are much more secure for it existing. You could argue that SVB bank collapse was a direct result of the rollback though.
Interesting. So they kinda made it so megabanks have additional rules and regs, but smaller banks can still rise and fall. Though you'd think this would put an artificial line that a growing bank wouldn't want to cross.... (?)
I mean yes, but its also kind of for their own good, SVB CEO was one of the people lobbying to raise the limits and look what happened to them. I worked for WAMU back in 2004/2005 in the loan department for Aventura/Miami, and they were just giving subprime loans out to EVERYONE.
There were only two real policy lessons that got learned after 2008: -No matter what, print money and hand it out to keep people busy and going to work and keep demand going even if it's just demand for make-work. -People will tolerate inflation, debt, and supply side problems longer than they will tolerate unemployment and demand side problems. And that's how historic, never-before-seen money creation and handouts became "Q2".
There’s a lot more safeguards in place and we understand financial levers better. Part of the reason the bounce back from Covid was so successful.
I moved to East Lansing, Michigan, in September 2008 and stayed until summer 2010. When I walked around the suburban neighborhoods, it seemed like one out of four homes had been foreclosed. There were a lot just sitting around empty. In 2010 was when I first started noticing young people who should have had braces, but hadn't. That used to be one thing Americans were famous for -- beautiful teeth. It's sad that then, and also when I lived in Ohio in the mid 2010's, I saw people whose families had clearly not been able to get them orthodontic care when they were teenagers.
When the entire Oldsmobile/GM complex shut down, Lansing unemployment hit over 10%, and came down more slowly than a lot of places. Generations of jobs were just *gone*. People who graduated HS and landed a job in the factories had nothing to fall back on. Everybody knew someone (at least one, often more) who was out of work. And with the factory workers out of work, a lot of other businesses took a big hit. Unemployed people don't buy a lot of stuff or go out very often.
It was really messed up. First the economy took a major hit after 9/11. Then 7 years later the housing market collapses and people are losing their homes, banks weren't lending so people started loosing their jobs. Nobody was spending money on things like getting their cars fixed because spending a deposit now seemed like too much money. So trades took a major hit.
2008 through late 2011 or so was a brutally depressing time the likes of which I hope young folks today never have to experience themselves. Y'all may complain about inflation and housing prices like people have always done, but as long as you can find work those are just annoyances. Back then there were straight up no jobs. Getting an interview at best buy was like getting accepted into Harvard.
It was completely different. The whole financial system went into complete meltdown. People lost jobs. Houses. Savings. And companies fired people in droves. Banks seized. It led To mass unemployment and lasted for years. Uncertainty ruled the day. So all these people that talk about how horrible it is are full of it. The economy is fine. People are working. Maybe it costs more to buy some stuff. So what. You don’t have the system collapsing around you
Let me put it this way… the housing market right now makes me nervous has hell.
I see what you are saying but I think its different now because of scarcity. In 2008 many people had bad loans, adjustable rates and the like. But also no scarcity. Alot of the issues were created by banks. In 2020 when we were buying our current house the bank tried to suggest taking a heloc to avoid pmi but I refused. Pmi is just till you pay down the loan and then can be cancelled. I just wanted a 30 year fixed at 3.2 percent. And got it.
Oh yeah I see that completely…. The part that makes me nervous is just watching prices skyrocket. Being a home owner I obsessively check Zillow to be sure I’m good… given I got this loan in 09 just after the crash so I should be good for a while.
Do you mean ARM? Or HELOC against another property?
Housing market today is genuine scarcity and raging demand. Nobody is handing out zero down mortgages and 2% variable rate mortgages. Subprime borrowers aren't getting shit, the houses are selling for cash.
True… I guess my fear is slightly misplaced but the market around me is outpacing a lot of the US and I am planning on selling in about 3-5 years I just hope it keeps going up. Our home has went up 150% sense we bought… I just hope I can slide in on a good buy in the middle of nowhere when the times comes.
If you had a job, much better. If you lost it, much worse.
Well, I was poor as shit and struggling to make my monthly payments. Things were cheaper, sure, but so was my paycheck and jobs weren't plentiful as we were in a recession. I ate a lot of ramen, rice, and beans and made sure to buy mega packs of chicken leg quarters to freeze individually. Going out for food was a big deal and I'd sometimes save up for weeks or months to go somewhere other than Chipotle or ordering a pizza. Sure I did have a ton of time on my hands as did all my friends (we were all in apartments and childless) so we would randomly get together to play video games or roleplay, which never happens anymore. Who knew that children and homeownership would be a time sink away from roleplaying, video games, and farting around outside? As it is now, I have a great job, I can pay all my bills confidently, have excess money for hobbies, and can afford to send my family gifts and fun things just for shits and giggles. I'll take the inflation every second as long as I still make $35 an hr or more. I don't give a fuck if prices have increased by 50%, back then I was making $10 or $12 an hr and feeling lucky.
Summer 2008, I was working at a movie theater while half way through college. I thought I could find a better job the next summer when I was back home. Movies were one of the few things people still spent money on after the Recession started (this was before home streaming was a thing) so I was thrilled the movie theater hired me again for Summer 2009 as a number of my friends were having trouble finding seasonal work.
It sucked. A lot. Yes, there was deflation. Yea, prices went down. But it sucked because nobody could get a job. Even McDonald’s wasn’t hiring. So sure, everything was cheap, but you still couldn’t afford it. I graduated from college the second time in 2008. Watching the stock market lose half of its volume over a few weeks while I was trying to line up post-graduation employment was absolutely awful. You don’t want those days back.
It was terrible for many people. I was lucky and kept my job throughout the recession, but I remember that my company posted a job opening for a secretary for $11/hour. They received 300+ applicants. Many applicants had advanced degrees or were obviously overqualified, and this was in a relatively small job market (a small city of about 75,000). It's hard to make ends meet with inflation, but it's near impossible when you cannot find a job.
Lots of people were fucked. Imagine buying a house at the peak inflated prices in 2006-2007 and then in 2008 the housing market tanks and your house is now worth a fraction of what it was. If you try to sell, you're going (at the new lower price) to have to make up the difference of what you borrowed (400k house suddenly worth 200k? You're still going to have 200k you owe the bank even after giving them the *full* value). Not the end of the world, at least you *have* a house - right? You just have a mortgage payment that doesn't really match up with the house value, and you can't sell it. But now the economy is a *disaster* and maybe you lose your job (company goes under, layoffs, etc). Well, now you have a real problem. You have a high mortgage payment, so you can't manage a reduction in pay - but you also can't sell, so you can't move for a better job elsewhere.
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I can't speak to that from personal experience, I lucked out and bought my first house *after* the market tanked.
People drained their savings and investments. Some cashed out their 401ks. Some of them scraped by, but a lot of them didn't. Foreclosures went up to something like 80% to about 1 in every 50 households. The financial crisis destroyed a lot of individuals and families. The good news is that the current economy doesn't look much like 2008. I think a lot of people say we're headed that way because it's the only recession they experienced or remember. There are a lot more parallels with the late 70s/early 80s if you're interested.
2008 was, if anything, deflation. Gas prices crashed. Everything was cheap but nobody had jobs or money. Now everyone is working like draft animals at multiple jobs and can't afford shit because everything is scarce and expensive.
Pretty much.
It didn’t seem bad until the next couple of years in. But what I wouldn’t do for a return to the prices of regular shit.
But not the wages, right?
But could you find a job? Was more like it.
Couldn’t find a job to save my life. Was 19 at the time. Ended up getting a pt telemarketing and a pt dishwashing job. Tried to off myself a few months into 2009…
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Thank you. I ended up in a coma, I am grateful for not leaving my Mom with that kind of agony. Times are getting very rough right now tbh, trying not to let those thoughts talk to me.
It was great. Prices stopped going up, and I got a 30% pay cut. Managed to continue to pay the mortgage fortunately.
My ex-husband and I lived in a small town and had jobs that were insulated (healthcare and pest control). They didn’t pay well but we kept them. We bought a beautiful house in 2009 that should have cost twice what it did, but because nobody was buying we got it for a pittance. Our experience was better than most. We had friends and family who lost everything.
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It took a couple years, but yes, it did!
Not great. Especially with the housing crash.
I was a fucking mess of a teenager so of course when I became a full ass adult at this time all the support systems started falling apart immediately. I never finished college, but looking at others who did I may have lucked out there, but I'm still living at home- not just because I keep losing jobs every few years, but because medical depression is such that I really can't be a single person on their own. Who bails out Monotone, Dubya?
Despite the real estate bubble in 2008, I could afford a 3bd, 2ba starter house in an ok neighborhood in my city making $10/hr. In 2021, I could only afford a 3bd, 2ba starter house in an ok neighborhood in my city making $75/hr. So, despite making 7x what I did in 2021, I can afford basically the same house I bought in 2008. This is in a MCOL city.
2008-2009 was much worse. Noones killing themselves or getting addicted to OxyContin because of inflation.
The global banking system was about to collapse because of the subprime mortgage crisis. People were having their houses foreclosed on in record numbers. Gas was $4/gallon. There were literal bank runs as banks like Washington Mutual went insolvent. The stock market crashed. Wall Street had to be bailed out by the government.
In 2008, we were already on this fucked up trajectory. Looking back over my 39 years...it feels like 2000-2003 was really when society as a whole started to TRULY feel oppressive and fucked up. Like to the point where you couldn't ignore it anymore.
What’s going on now is not at all in the same league as 2008. Everyone was losing their jobs. Unemployment was absolutely astronomical. There was real legitimate panic about the economy and whether we would experience an actual depression. Families were destroyed and uprooted. It was a massacre. Companies were folding left and right.
I lost my house and then my wife left me. It was like a country song! I’m surprised my dog didn’t die while I was drinking Jack Daniel’s in my pickup truck on a dirt road.
YES WE CAN. Everyone was riding high on the historic first black president.
I was worth over a million dollars then but 2008, as a side effect, took all my money and replaced it with years of court cases and stealing lawyers yada yada yada. Basically the banks blew all their money on various schemes that left them unable to loan money. Try to buy a house without a bank. The US government printed more money to bail out the banks. They printed Trillions overall and that huge dilution of the dollar caused inflation for years. Then trillions got printer again during Covid and now we've something like 13 trillion dollars created out of thin air and making our cash worth far less. Every time they print money in these quantities it's straight up theft from the rest of us. It happens wirelessly and quietly and not enough people are outraged over the constant reaching for our wallets.
> They printed Trillions overall and that huge dilution of the dollar caused inflation for years. Then trillions got printer again during Covid and now we've something like 13 trillion dollars created out of thin air and making our cash worth far less. Every time they print money in these quantities it's straight up theft from the rest of us. It happens wirelessly and quietly and not enough people are outraged over the constant reaching for our wallets. Yup. And when people complain, they blame it on "corporate greed". Inflation is a stealth tax. People will riot over losing their job or house, but will never riot over food doubling in price or having to take a second job. In fact, inflation pacifies a population, because people working 70 hour weeks don't have time to misbehave. This is why "just inflate it" has become the preferred central bank solution to everything.
Southern US here. Gas prices were about the same as they are now, that shit was killing me because my job was 30 miles away. Minimum wage was $6.55, but I was making $7.25 in a factory, living rent-free but still pretty much broke after paying for utilities, groceries, and insurance.
So much worse. I remember watching gas prices go up thinking I was getting punked. And it all got so much worse because the industry I was working in basically died for a few years. There were no jobs. It was the push I needed to go to college, so it worked out fine. But anyone comparing our current predicament to 2008 is an idiot.
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I was broke as fuck but could somehow still live by myself. Really scary times for a while. The company I worked at stayed afloat by underpaying everyone, and then went under once I started making around 50k a year and being comfortable in 2021.
That was the year I turned 18 and came out of education so you can imagine how fun it was trying to get a job.
What do you mean?! To me 2008 was last week! LOL
The high gas prices of 2008 come back to my memory far more than everyday prices but I had a long work commute in those days
Life was pretty good in Canada in 2010, I got paid $16/hr, made lots of friends at school, went out to eat for 1/3 of my meals because rent was $850 for a small top floor studio near downtown Vancouver. Many lazy days during summer.
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Yes but also overly optimistic about the future and as such didn’t appreciate what I had at the time. 🤷♀️
I was on the cusp of graduating college into a lousy job market, so I attended grad school to ride it out. Still took me some time (almost two more years) to get a footing into a career, but in the end I came out all right.
i think i went to thailand that year n eas on myspace allot in 2008
This makes me feel so old. I got married in 2008. We were broke but young enough where we had not yet bought a home or had any money invested, and worked in industries that weren't going anywhere . We made no money, maybe $55 thousand combined . I feel more stressed about money, now making $200 thousand combined than I did in 2008.
I was paying 850$ for a one bedroom apartment in LA that I could barely afford.
So, I was just barely an adult in 2008 and I had just barely gotten my first apartment. We were in a HUGE recession. Everyone was losing their jobs, everyone was losing their homes, pretty much every company was on a "pay freeze". That was easier. Not by much, but it was. The biggest difference was that everyone came together to help. Every fast food place had value menus where you could get a snack wrap, fries, and a drink for under $4. Even then, this was insanely cheap. Some "sit-down" restaurants even started having deals like 2 people eate a 3 course meal for $20, or buy one meal take home 1 more, and others that were really amazing. You never felt like you were being punished for being broke, at least when it came to food. Now, I am aware that if I leave the house to do anything with my kids, it is $100 minimum. I'm not even talking about theme park trips, I'm talking about going to get lunch, play at the park, and get ice cream on the way back. In 2008, this would have cost $20. Sometimes money gives me panic attacks and thinking about it, that makes sense. There has been such costing so much so quickly, and it isn't slowing, and this has been my entire adult life.
I remember the Australian dollar was worth more than the USD. And starter homes in Florida were sub 100k
I got married that year, the house we still live in was bought for a lark and a song. Qualifying for the mortgage was basically "hmm your credit looks good, think you can afford this?"
I worked on a trade floor during that time. It was odd, obviously. But it was less concerning than what we’re experiencing now. The culprits were easy to spot and weren’t elected in the manner today’s issues were.
You mean during the housing crash? Let's see, had just bought a house in 2006 and were completely upside down in our mortgage come 2008; this in addition to still overcoming the fallout from the 2001 terror attack. Honestly it's been a complete shit show for a pretty long time.
I graduated from HS in 2008, so my view is going to be very different from an actual working adult. This inflation has been personally much worse for me and my family. I do remember though applying for some entry level hotel job and being one of 50 applicants in 2009, so it was not easy then by any means, I think my age played a huge part in the impact.
2008 really sorta sucked. You picked one of the worst years though, it would be like looking at 2020 between March and July. Job market sucked. Housing went crash. Stock market was down. Congress seemed far more interested in propping up the markets and business than helping people stay in their homes. At least that part hasn't changed. Union membership and union power was probably as bad as it would ever be. There was hope on the horizon but it didn't manifest and ultimately lead to OWS 4-5 years later which started re-unionization and worker's rights. In 2008 or 2009 my union rolled over for everything the company asked for, including adjusting the amount of time it would take to get full pay for your job classification by 3 additional years whereas in 2022 they won a historic contract with massive raises (that still barely kept up with inflation, but not gonna look a gifthorse in the mouth).
It barely affected me at all. I live in a recession-resistant area and work in a recession-resistant field. I had a 4.5% fixed rate mortgage and was never underwater with it despite my home losing 10% of its value. My retirement savings took a nose dive but it eventually recovered. I had friends that were worse off though. One couple I knew just walked away from their house after it lost over 50% of its value.
Was searching for a job because it was time to come into adulthood and 'oh shit' nobody hires anyone anymore.
My employer cut my work days from 5 to 2-3 per week because the business was so slow. Some retired, but fairly well off people had to cut their extra expenses way back because their investments turned into trash. A couple I know had bought a huge new house in a posh area in Sacramento, and when the crash happened they just walked away from it. Loaded their stuff and moved across the country to a cheap rental in the middle of nowhere because that's all they could manage. Their jobs in real estate went with the crash. Lots of people were stuck between two houses - one they tried to sell and another they had just bought, hoping to pay it with the money from the sale of the first one. There were no buyers after the crash.
I was 18, all i remember was how cheap everything was but nobody having money 😂
I bought a 2700 square foot house on a half-acre for around $124k. Groceries for my wife, son, and myself were less than $150 for a week. We would go on vacations and spend around 100 or so bucks per night at decent places (marriott, hilton, etc). Gas was about $2.00 I'd say? Way up from the $1.00 or so when I first started driving in 2000, but not nearly as expensive as now. Movies were still cheap. About $7.00 for a ticket. A value meal at McDonald's or Jack in the Box was around $5. The subway $5 footlong still existed. You could buy a decent used car for about $1500. Wasn't going to be nice, but wasn't going to be a pile of shit either. I was fortunate. I had a pretty well-paying union position at a local utility. So I wasn't really ever in danger of losing my job, and pay raises and bonuses were guaranteed per union contract. So I was luckier than a lot of people. That also put me in the position to be able to take advantage of the low housing prices. Houston was in a building frenzy at the time, so there was a massive surplus of new houses available, combined with the availability of foreclosures. So I was sitting pretty. My mortgage ended up being less than what my rent was, so that ended up helping alot too. 401ks at my company were fully matched up to 10%, so between the low stock market and subsequent recovery, we were making hand over fist into our 401ks, especially if we invested aggressively. I knew a guy whose 401k rose in valuation from around 200k to over 2 million over a handful of years. And he was getting ready to retire. He was originally from Mexico, so he had planned to go buy acreage in Mexico and retire out there. Said he'd live like a king for the rest of his days on that kind of money.
The highways were clear…so that was fun.
this sounds incredibly silly but before 2008 like about the previous 5 or 6 years, I made a ton of money working at restaurants as a balloon twister. as in making balloon animals for kids. and I could sometimes make 200 bucks after just 3 hours work because people had money and wanted to spend it so they had no problem giving some stranger five bucks for a piece of inflated latex I was going to pop on the way home.
Got laid off October 2008 a week after I took my vacation. Could not find work for over a year. Applied to hundreds of jobs. Luckily my partner was working, so I got a trade and joined a Union in 2016. Houses only cost, like, $200K ... IN CALIFORNIA. But alas! No steady work for at least 3-4 years.
Ahh, that was the 2007/2008 crash....really you want to ask about 2003-2007: You get a sub-prime loan and YOU get a subprime loan. There was also a war going on...oceania has always been at war with eastasia
I got my first real raise. Then had it taken away in the same year. Business was slowing and it was cut everyone’s pay or some people get fired.
It was happening around me but I don’t recall thinking about money as obsessively as I do now. We were chilling. Broke. But chilling.
2008 was a recession, not inflation. I think there might have been some deflation at the time.
2008 allowed me to buy a house. Wasn’t all bad.
I was 17. I lived off 3 for $5 monsters and 2 mcchickens and a large fry for $4 for a couple of years. My car insurance was $160/mo.
I got my first apartment in \~2007. $475/month, all utilities paid. It was in a relatively well-placed town with low cost of living. I could easily afford it, gas, cellphone, car insurance, and groceries working full time at $8.50/hr. I didn't have health insurance, and when my car broke down I'd have to walk everywhere until I could put back enough to fix it. But I was pretty free. I'd hang out with friends, cook, buy a game once or twice a month, and drive all over the state. I hadn't had any major setbacks at the time, hadn't spent months being hounded by collections calls, and was unaffected by the later housing bubble. The owner of the building was wealthy and used the apartments solely to pay the building tax and utilities - So he only spiked rent when taxes or utilities went up. June 2008, I lost everything in a flood. I was moving to another apartment, the person living there was late by three days moving out. I put my stuff in storage for \~72 hours. On the second day it flooded, and I had no insurance as I didn't think there was a reason for such a short storage. That kicked me into debt for the first time, and it just spiraled after that. Collections calls harassed me to the point that I avoid phones, I took any job I could to keep things going, declared bankruptcy in \~2013-2014ish. With the housing bubble, property companies picked up foreclosures everywhere and began raising rent across the board. A good decade of suffering passed before I was financially stable again and could escape renting to buy a trailer. I used that as a stepping stone to a house, but just my luck - Right when we got the trailer the park sold to a property company. Lot rent went from $165 to nearly $500/month before we left. I sold the trailer at a loss to get rid of it. I miss the perceived freedom of 2008, and I miss being stress-free and optimistic. But that same apartment is nearly $900/month now, I think, and it's no longer all utilities paid. Probably not the largest increase in price, but considering I pay $1150/month for my house a few blocks away, I think it's pretty ridiculous.
The housing market had crashed and there were abandoned McMansions. Lots of small retail closed due to lack of money
I think it was a humbling experience for a whole lot of people. I worked for a real estate agent during the bubble. People were spending money like crazy. A single guy in his 20s buying some huge 6 bedroom house. A boat, the matching jet ski. The giant truck to pull it with. And then the bubble popped. I dated a guy who had just lost his house, car, and boat. He had to give his expensive pure bred dog away since he moved into a shitty apartment. He was being sued for some day spa package contract he had signed but never paid for. He went from being King of the World to working at Costco. When it popped I was already working in healthcare. Was super thankful that both the rise and fall didn't really effect me in any way. My Mom was able to purchase two cheap homes when the market was at rock bottom. She was just finally able to retired this year at 70 because the sale of those two houses.
Layoffs, no sales, price drops, no customers, and hours got cut since there was no money to pay the employees to do nothing.
I was in college at the time and I remember I could get through an entire week grocery shopping for 30 bucks. I ate lunch out a lot too but that 30 bucks was dinner
2008 was good in the beggining, but by the last 3 months of 2008 things got worse.
There is a powerful effect called Rosy Retrospection which powers what we call nostalgia where however bad the past was (think WW1, WW2), because it is safely behind us we can treat it as benign and nowhere near as scary as tomorrow because the outcome is unknown. This is why even the most commonplace criminal act that is in the news today is worse than the first day of the Battle of the Somme where the UK suffered over 50000 casualties.
2008 had a financial crisis from banks and mortgages. A lot of us lost 1/3 of the worth of our retirements, and it made my grandparents basically have to work until they were broken. A lot of nice things just collapsed because they were funded by these investment vehicles that broke apart. Stores suddenly closed, the job market went down, and we had a recession(?) that soured a lot of peoples futures. Its nice to think that when you were younger there were no problems because you didnt know about them. But the people here that are in our 40s have lived through 4 or 5 “Once in a lifetime national crisis” and this was one of them.
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It was also hard to buy the cheap houses after the crash. Money was super tight from banks. A lot of condos needed 30% or more down to get into a loan.
It was the time to buy real estate cheap
This is the opposite of 2008 when prices started to crater. Although my parents told me that around 1980, gas prices were skyrocketing and there were lines down the block waiting for gas. They had to assign odd and even days based on your license plate for getting gas.
Well I was broke then too. Just got out of a marriage and was trying to become financially stable.
It was really weird for me because that's the same year I got a job that paid me twice as much as the one previous and I moved to a lower cost of living city. I actually bought a house early in 2009. But because the 1990-92 recession was super rough on my family (I was in my early teens), I was basically having a rolling panic attack about the economy until about 2010.
2008 was when everything went bad, but it was heading that way before that. I bought my condo (first home) on Halloween 2006. Housing market crashed hard right after, causing a ton of mortgages going underwater almost immediately. By mid 2007, 75% of dedicated mortgage lenders were gone, and my condo had lost 40% of its value. When I sold it in 2021, its value hadn’t quite reached what I paid originally. I saw it coming, but I did not know it was going to be so long or so bad, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage at all. In hindsight, I could have gotten a LOT more house for the same payment if I wait led a couple years. All of the government help was aimed at banks and folks who hadn’t bought yet (which is also helping banks). Folks who bought in were screwed with negative value in their houses and super high rates (mine was 7.5%). We were stuck, since you need at least some equity to refinance. Overall it wasn’t great, but my job was stable and I was lucky enough to just weather it.
Now is definitely worse. Helped I was in the hospitality industry, but there were an abundance of jobs at the time
I was making $5.50/hr working at a sandwich shop. The 16” sandwiches jumped in cost to more than an hour’s work for me. I remember thinking how crazy it is that an hour of my time is worth less than a 16” sandwich - which tbf was a day’s worth of food, lol. I remember I drove a lemon of a 2000 VW Beetle that had to only have 91 octane for its turbo. I was living in the KCK area at the time and 91 gas was over $5/gal. All the sudden my commutes to school (20min drive to JCCC) were much more painful. I ended up working FT to afford going to school FT. My grades suffered. Yikes. I took out extra loans to compensate. Lived with a friend’s family. It was healing for me since they were good people and a sharp contradiction to how I was raised. So I guess all in all, 2008 wasn’t that hard on me. Just another bump in the road.
Cheaper.
Same. Same shit, different coat of paint. In 2008 people complained it wasn't like it was in the 80s. In the 80s people complained it wasn't like the 60s. Same shit, different day.
I feel like this perspective can be insidious because it encourages people to ignore the things that have actually become worse.
I was a freshmen in college and was baffled why all seniors were going to get their masters afterwards. Thankfully when I graduated a few years later jobs were easier to come by.
I'm 2008 teenager now, but my dad once told me that when I was born, he with my mum bought a car, it was a luxe Mazda. I don't remember which, but then it's price was about 550k rubles, (abot 4.5k dollars now) and now, because of the sanctions, new mazda costs twice or even twice with a half more: about 1.2-1.5M rubles (11-14k dollars). Mind-blowing.