When does the "Cost of living crisis end"

[topcat2014]

There will always be inflation. The media created this thing called a cost of living crisis.

Recessions have a technical definition, so therefore a technical end.

What is going to be the trigger for society agreeing the cost of living crisis is over?

We are an island
Housing costs are always going to be higher plus living in a house is not the norm elswhere, people live in apartments
Whilst I agree rental housing should be more secure, we have appalling behaviour from people who then wonder why their landlord wants them out
The cost of utilities is directly affected by war/ climate change and water is in short supply , there is not someone randomly hiking prices

As a country we have debt to the tune of approx £18,500 per household
We are obsessed with buying tat and driving big cars in a way our peers in other countries are not
Every single thread on " omg the cost of living" is the same

Doesnt work FT
Kids they cant afford
Shit with money

Time to grow up

This

Adults need to be able to retrain, the workforce needs to be able to adapt to needs, changes in technology, economic climate etc.

Austerity meant that on the job training by employers has been cut to the bone.

University is too expensive for many, and anyway is one-shot training aimed at the young, out of reach for most adults.

I'm currently retraining to adapt to changes in my workplace and stay employable. I've needed to for some time (disability is worsening) but just couldnt afford it, thought I would end up having to leave and claim benefits, joining the so called "economically inactive" 🤬 while waiting for retirement age.

I got a stroke of luck and persuaded my employer to pay for a work based course, but such schemes are like hens teeth compared to when I was younger.

Agree with this also.

People are naive if they think the oligarchs all own a social media site for the general good of society.

It suits the rich to point the finger at the people furthest away from them.

"Look over there!"

👹👉🧑‍🦽

growth based on what, though?

previously, as in up until the mid-80s, growth was based on tangibles, but we shipped the majority of that overseas because certain historical figures hated trade unions and saw the value in non-tangibles

unfortunately, the 2008 financial meltdown exposed the hollow economics of basing your GDP on fiat money and a debt-economy driven by property transactions (that occupy their own wonky, distorted market) and the service industries - there is nothing behind it to prop it up, Wizard Of Oz economics, the curtain gets pulled back and the theatrics exposes

a tongue in cheek summary is fiat money is the dying king because we sold off Ford, Vauxhall, Leyland, Rover and replaced it with Barratt Holmes and Amazon

and simultaneously, whilst we were making hay while the sun shone, we were burning through our CO2 budgets and now we have a nasty overdraft with excruciating interest rates... and the bailiffs are demanding repayment in various ways that have become all too clear to those without blinkers or agenda

meanwhile, other countries seem intent on wringing the dregs out of disaster capitalism and burning every last inch of oil that exists on the planet, even if that means polluting the Arctic circle

the answer is not "more growth"

the answer is a completely different paradigm, with a heavy clean-tech focus

Not quite that bad, but there were very few benefits, top up or full, about for families then.

Jumble sales were the cheap clothes route. No food banks, clothes banks, or any other sort of things. The only banks were the high street ones. 😉

Not all of us bought houses, council or otherwise. Poor quality housing was rife. Inflation bounced up and down, as did interest rates.

I worked through my childrearing years and beyond - and had to pay all child care costs.

It wasn’t all bad, obviously, and it isn’t now.

@Boomer55did you miss the bit that 30% of families in the 70s & 80s lived in council housing? MIRAS? child benefit/family allowance? widows pension, ERS, etc

The idea that there wasn’t any benefits is absolute nonsense.

Plus plenty of today’s families are like myself who receive little or no help, I think I had 15 free hours of childcare for one year

the Oligarchs have to promote unrest and division

because they'd absolutely lynched, otherwise

hence, their gated communities and bodyguards... what good is a body guard against 5 trained men?

if you think about it, society only functions because of cooperation - direct and implied, but that cooperation is ultimately founded in the concepts of fairness and equity

Poor quality housing was rife. Inflation bounced up and down, as did interest rates.

Todays interest rates are not to dissimilar to the past when you account for salaries vs house prices. Housing costs are a huge part of our productivity problem & one reasons benefits are high.

I worked through my childrearing years and beyond - and had to pay all child care costs.

And costs were inline with today?

It wasn’t all bad, obviously, and it isn’t now.

I haven’t said it was all bad but the economic is in serious strife because we never recovered from the 08 crash as I already said. Years of stagnant wages & little investment against a backdrop of an ageing population. This is not a formula for growth!

ha

so the reason the county/world is on its arse is because of the sub-section of layabouts that ready fodder for demonising

and the not the Ponzi scheme of the 1% sucking eye-watering levels of functional wealth out of the circulating economy up into private investment schemes and shares?? 😆

proportionality and scale

the well-funded distraction 🐿are clearly effective in this locale - at least those that didn't get squished by the highly infrequent Number 350 big red bus service

water is in short supply , there is not someone randomly hiking prices

Actually, there is someone (or several people) taking the money, failing to invest, and hiking prices as high as Ofwat will allow.
I went for an interview for an admin job at my local water company, so before the interview I did the usual thing of looking them up on Companies House website. Turns out that there are about four levels of companies owning companies owning the water company, and the ultimate beneficiary was a multi-millionaire who lived in the far East.

The privatisation of so much of our basic infrastructure decades ago (including PFI deals on hospitals and schools), meaning that all the profits are sucked out of the UK and sent abroad, instead of staying in this country to be re-invested or re-distributed, is a large part of why we are in such a mess now.

your post is starting off on a misleading premise

the decline in quality of life is real and has hugely accelerated in the UK and across the globe

where do you want to start?

De-instutrialisation of the western economies since the mid 80s?
with a commensurate switch to a debt-driven economic model purely based on speculative opinion (trading) and non-tangibles (property)?
Privatisation of state industries into neglectful, wealth-siphoning machines from 1990?
A major crumbling of the above pyramid scheme in 2007-09?
Rescuing the broken and fraudulent system by signing everyone up to pay the debt hangover of the above called Austerity?
Abandoning frictionless trade with Europe in 2016?
The global black swan event of 2020-21?
Putin's 2022-203? war of choice?
Liz Trust issues 2022 budget?
"Trump's Tariffs" and his subsequent 2026 war of choice?
Climate change impacting on harvests?

Call it Cost of Living, call it whatever you want and while the media functions by maximising eyeballs on content, the above events have real-world consequences

Cost of Living is not just a fee-earning media headline, its a real phenomenon

Prosperity for the masses has generally stagnated and or declined for at least 2 decades... while prices of everything have absolutely spiked in the last 5 years, with the last 2 or 3 being particularly brutal

It may 'stop' (begin a long road to recovery) when people open their eyes and stop voting in psychopathic maniacs that serve a voter's best short-term interests, whether that be financial or ideological agenda

Oh and unless we get a handle on Climate Change, the tangible and intangible costs incurred of all above so far will be absolutely dwarfed by what yet is in store

No I didnt say that
The world is on its arse clearly
The wealthy are always going to protect their own interests
However
Sitting around with your hand out whilst simultaneously spending money on tat and things you cant afford and then moaning about being skint isnt going to help you

Personal responsibilty is lacking

Yes good point and being allowed to buy property in the UK, other countries are more restrictive

I don’t think the crash of 08 has much to do with it. Things were feeling much better by 2012.
The whole of Europe is feeling the cost of living crisis.
It’s weird to me how what happened during COVID seems to be sort of glossed over.
You can’t shut down whole countries economies for the months at a time, over 2 years, hand out billions in newly minted money, destroy businesses and industries that would never recover, keep young people from education, social activities and work and then expect to bounce right back.
Add to that huge waves of immigration of populations that are a net drain, a ballooning sick benefit bill, and the HR- isation of recruitment (YES people want jobs, they just can’t get past the fucking 4 stage recruitment process!)

Throw in employer NI increase, automation and crippling business rates and you have a recipe for total stagnation and decay.
We need to get back to work, and start rebuilding.
I say this as a previous small business owner and parent of a NEET… it’s hard to get out from under when the deck is stacked against you but we should at least be honest about where it went wrong.

except, even if people are claiming for an 8 bedroom house and going on 18 holidays a year to Ibiza, that's not the primary cause for the mess we are in, its an extra burden on a broken system, well, its broken for the majority.

People have been repeatedly voting in shysters because they personally benefit from it in financial and ideological form - I'd say that's a failure of personal and collective responsibilty

as for the wealthy are always going to protect their own interests,

go and look at my standalone post to OP and look at the step-change that has occurred and try to write that off as Business As Usual for Rich People - compared to the early and mid 20th Century... we have long stopped operating in that world

if you can find any significant thing on that list of mine and blame it on the "benefit cheats and layabouts", let me know

I’m a bit puzzled by parts of your post.

How is building a house less of a ‘tangible’ than building a car? And isn’t Amazon (at least in its original incarnation) all about selling tangibles?

And if we are moving away from resource-consuming growth, then aren’t services going to be a big part of that? Orienting our economy towards doing things for each other that we see value in (services) rather than making and trading more stuff?

you're a bit puzzled by my parts of post?

that's not a me problem

the car is a commodity, a luxury, whereas a home is a basic human need

how many times through a generation do you build a car versus a house?
does the car generally depreciate or appreciate in value?
the same building generally gets multiple increased valuations
once you've built the house, but sold the car industry, how do you replace the car building skills?

The point about Amazon is many-fold, for one, its a global monopoly that has contributed to the death of the high-street, but most importantly, its the majority of the products are now made in the world's factory that is now China.. who are also still fossil fuel heavy

Also, why do you think my post ended with clean tech?

@TrappedByThisDesk

The privatisation of so much of our basic infrastructure decades ago (including PFI deals on hospitals and schools), meaning that all the profits are sucked out of the UK and sent abroad, instead of staying in this country to be re-invested or re-distributed, is a large part of why we are in such a mess now.

Whilst I agree, it was necessary at the time.

The country was already in massive debt and we needed to spend billions on new infrastructure, new hospitals and schools, new power stations, a complete replacement of all trains, etc., which we simply couldn't finance by piling on more government debt, hence PFI, privatisations, etc to get private finance to pay for all the investments needed. Obviously the private investors want a return on their monies. I think the real problem was the incompetence and cack-handedness of the civil servants who didn't check the legal agreements such as PFI agreements properly and failed to implement proper checks and balances over the privatised companies as it's often said that the likes of Ofwat, Ofgen etc havn't really regulated the privatised industries properly.

@TwelvePiecesOfFlair

I don’t think the crash of 08 has much to do with it. Things were feeling much better by 2012.

The statistics don't back that up. Leading economists at the time of the 2008 crash said it would take a decade for the economy to recover to post 2008 levels. It never did, because just as things were looking better, Covid hit, which will knock us back yet another decade, and now the Iran and Ukraine wars are likely to add yet another decade of recover time.

we never payed off the Austerity loan in the UK - its evident in the decline in public services to the state they are today, combined with complete inability to invest in anything new... because we can barely afford to maintain

as for things feeling much better, things were kicking off globally

2011 was the Arab Spring and a US war on Libya

by 2012, Syria was a clusterfuck, where the US and Russia where doing their best not get into a direct hot war with each other over

these all had financial and social implications that have directly contributed to where we are now... if people's countries get bombed to bits, they are going to look elsewhere

Also, the Greek economy was in a perilous state

except, even if people are claiming for an 8 bedroom house and going on 18 holidays a year to Ibiza, that's not the primary cause for the mess we are in, its an extra burden on a broken system, well, its broken for the majority

What?????

No idea what you are talking about !

We are currently seeing more and more people relying on benefits in the UK
The amount of people contributing is falling with the burden firmly on people who are employed
Tax thresholds have risen meaning working harder is pointless
We are effectively discouraging growth and personal responsibility and resilience

The 2008 crash has been influential and The Tories made it worse by kicking the can down the road, lending rules also loosened and we had a period of low interests rates which led to a huge upturn in borrowing and entitlement
Instagram/ fake lifestyles pumped out, most of it isnt real
The shit eventually hit the fan and here we are
Interest rates have risen, the markets, weather and world are now volatile

except, even if people are claiming for an 8 bedroom house and going on 18 holidays a year to Ibiza, that's not the primary cause for the mess we are in, its an extra burden on a broken system, well, its broken for the majority

Its quite obvious what that paragraph summarises and I don't really need to spend the time breaking it down into bite-sized chunks, especially as the rest of your post exemplifies how the system is broken for the majority

OK - looking at your points:
Other countries do have cheaper water costs but they achieve this through state owned and tax payer subsidised water companies. So whilst your water costs are lower, taxes will need to be higher. Which is fine if you are part of the 20 million working age adults that don't pay any income tax but an issue if you do.
You want cheaper gas prices (I assume you mean natural gas rather than "gas" as in an American word for petrol). Then this can be achieved by increased drilling in the North Sea, fracking in areas like Cheshire and Surrey and removing the energy levy on oil and gas companies. This reduces tax revenues which will need to be found from either increasing taxes elsewhere or cutting welfare spending.
You want cheaper electricity prices? Well the actual electricity generation cost only makes up about 50% of your bill. The other 50% is for new grid infrastructure for all those solar farms and wind farms and for subsidies for all those solar and wind farms. So you have to make choice between net zero and electricity prices.

As with all these things the average voter wants the upside (for example losing weight) but is not prepared to pay for the downside (restricting what you eat). Plus they all want it done in an unrealistic timeframe.

Yeah, maybe. I’ve not seen statistics, and I remember they said it would take a decade. I also remember sudden massive food inflation at that time.
Things just seemed to be getting on an even keel though, in normal ways. I think COVID shafted us more than the crash though.