Do you remember the day the 2008 crash happened?

[mwmw]

What were you doing? Did you think it would turn out as horrifically bad as it did?

Northern Rock first then Lehman Bros, Fanny Mae and Freddy Mac, and the government having to save Lloyd’s and RBS. The credit crunch. Global recession due to international banks making risky loans. A lot of IMO unjustified blame placed on Gordon Brown. Austerity all over Europe and US. Greece and Iceland nearly going under.

It was only 11 years ago.

Yes very well, my dh was fucked. Earning 50k one minute, zero the next. It was tough for us, our savings ran out really quickly, no entitlement to benefits as self employed, I was on mat leave and my job just disappeared. Good times

Yep, I was in the Lehman’s Building, watching the ‘ticker tape’ feed on the building opposite.
We were told the project we were working on was suspended, by a bully boy project manager, I think they call it Schadenfreude, he was as white as a sheet

I’m a financial journalist so yes, very much so. There was a big party hosted by Barclays that week - no one knew quite what to do with themselves. crazy crazy times. Total high point in my career In terms of exciting stories to write. Pretty much a low point in every other way.

Was working full time with 2 kids under 4, and finishing off my masters. Submitted my final piece of work on Aug 30th and remember celebrating with husband that at last our life would get a little less complicated and stressed. Next day the bank I worked for announced the takeover of Dresdner and I was flung into the middle of it. 2 weeks later Lehman’s collapsed and think it was the next day that Merrill lynch went down, then they all fell like cards pretty much every day for a couple of weeks. It was absolute bedlam. The fallout still reverberates - I’m working on a piece of work directly related to it, more than 10 years on.

I thought the it happened in 2007 as dc3 was born that year and the construction industry was drying up and we were getting worried... it just got worse.
I remember Lehman but I can't remember which year that was in.
I agree it wasn't a huge specific event but a series of events which added up to be the recession.

I was working for RBS then and I'd been abroad travelling for a month. I remember seeing someone with s British paper which said RBS hanging on by a thread and i thought wtf has happened...?

I scraped redundancy but saw so many colleagues leave. I remember being so embarrassed working for the bank especially when seeing the documentaries on Sub prime US mortgages and also how they failed UK business customers.

I was young and worked in a call centre and felt so awful and helpless for the customers.

I knew it was only a matter of time before I was made redundant and I was, sooner than I realised

I thought the it happened in 2007

I'd agree. That's when Northern Rock died on its arse.

I think Black Monday October 1987 was more memorable and had more affect. It was the week I started going out with DH.
There had been the terrible storm the week before. I was also doing an evening btec course and we had to do a fantasy buying and selling of shares that term. Nobody made any "money."

As I said above Dsis worked for Lehman bros at the time. I dont think she lost her job until a while later.

Yes, it happened on the day my child was born. I worked in private equity at the time and actually most of us had known something horrid was coming for nearly two years and my boss had been warning the government on the unsustainability of debt selling. We didn’t know when it would happen but we did know it would.

It was the day DS was born! DH boughtva copy of The Times that morning. Headline was;
Fanny May and Freddie Mac collpase
US economy crashed
Works economy in free fall

What crash?

I was working in an office building near Lehman Brothers but I was on annual leave for a couple of days at the critical time. I came back and it was like I'd missed an asteroid hitting Canary Wharf, everyone in shock.

I was in an admin role so I did a lot of sending out documents to different recipients. Over the following days/weeks more than half of them started bouncing back with "recipient does not work here anymore" .

I don't think there was one particularly day either. It started for me with northern rock and just continued. Obviously peaking in 2008

No, I was 12. All I know of it is that people in the 5/10 years above me were fucked

Was working for a bank in the City, for senior management so in same office as the CEO. CEO looked absolutely shell shocked, clearly didn't see it coming. Within a few weeks about a quarter of our department had been made redundant. I remember that winter being very grim mood wise but come spring 2009 things seemed to get back to "normal". The departments that made fast and deep cuts fared better than those who took a wait and see approach and ultimately had to make more redundancies over a longer period.

I highly encourage people to watch The Big Short to get an understanding of how big the house of cards was and how it came crashing down.

Yes, we lost all our equity (and more) on a house we owned in the US as a result of it.

Yes I was at work and it kicked off a big round of redundancies and business was very tough. I don't think I understood everything that led up to it at the tine though. But my grandfather lost all his life savings invested in stocks and bonds.

We were three days away from complete melt down. The skeletons certainly came out of the cupboard that day those poor Icelandiic people

I was in the US for work. With all my savings in Northern Rock. I remember remotely trying to move as much as possible. I moved most but had some in a passbook account that I just had to leave there as I needed to be physically in the branch to deal with it. I went back a few years later (by then it was Virgin). It was still there and had earned quite a nice amount of interest!

Yes, I could see it coming for months. I worked in Oil&Gas. I dealt with North and South American markets and you could sense their unease before it ever became a thing in Europe. I could sense it I suppose, though all of my colleagues were quite happy, like happy little lambs to the slaughter. That company no longer exists. I jumped ship in 2008. I think the company closed in 2010. I could see my own microcosm and how I was starting to struggle, so knew it was coming down the line.

I worked in the City in insurance at the time so was geographically close but economically quite distant. The nearest it got to us was the near collapse of AIG (super-giant US insurer) who’d set up a tiny Mayfair subsidiary to dabbling in interesting financial instruments and got very badly burned. I vividly remember Newsnight sending someone out to “a City pub” to interview the men hanging around outside in smart suits with pints. Unfortunately they hadn’t researched the difference between EC1 and EC3, so the pub they chose was The Hung Drawn and Quartered which is an insurers’ pub not a bankers’ pub. They could have given you chapter and verse on the hurricane currently heading for Florida and given you odds of whether it would land in Tampa or Jacksonville, but on the subject of debt swaps and Fannie Mae they were no better informed than a bloke in the Red Lion in Warrington.

I remember life pre-2008, when property was booming in manchester and i walked into a very lucrative role within it without any experience. These days i've been fighting tooth and nail for a year to get a decent job and havent got there yet :(

I remember the northern rock thing happening but the weird bit for me was that by 2010 i was working on a beef farm, the recession had really taken hold by then, but biz for us improved as more people ate at home and wanted quality ingredients.