to want to go and live in Brazil? Or India? Or China?

[headfairy]

Or anywhere that's not dying on it's feet with crippling economic woes. I am so depressed about the current situation, developments at work are going to make me increasingly worse off - I do appreciate I'm lucky to have a job now, but those developments are actually going to make it too expensive for me to work so I probably won't have one in 5 years. I've spent 20 years building my career and I'm going to have to let it all go.

I can't see our lives getting better for a decade, and the intervening years are going to be bloody hard. I want to go and live somewhere where the future is rosy. Not grim and cold.

We may have economic woes, but (generally speaking) our standard of living is still better for many in Brazil/India/China.

YANBU.Because as we all know there are very few people living in poverty in those countries.

gwan then. i expect you will be back within the month when you realise no one except the UK gives their citizens such a sense of entitlement, when you dont have good healthcare, good education, good law and order, very little corruption, stable electricity and fuel availability.

i could go on .....

You go to China and say I am X Y & Z, you need to give me this that and the other and see how fast they laugh in your face

Please, go to these places and just see how long you last. I've had to live in Brazil, and that was in a privileged area. No, thanks.

I know I'm being facetious... of course those countries have their own problems, though the middle class are largely sheltered from them

sansa As I'm originally from Argentina, Brazil wouldn't be too tough for me... actually Argentina was a lot worse, but then that was during the 70s and it was a military dicatorship. Definitely worse than here!

Is no one else depressed about the state we're in? Is no one else filled with a sense of impending doom? Or do you all have no mortgages, huge savings accounts, bullet proof jobs and massive income streams? In which case can I be your friend

No. Why be depressed? Life here on the whole is far, far better than in many places. Why waste time being depressed about a future we cannot control? Best to do what you can now to make it as secure as possible.

How on earth can I not be depressed about throwing away a 20 year career because my pay has fallen so far I can't afford to work any more? This story is repeated so many times across the country, not forgetting the whole generation of children who face a really shit time trying to find a job over the next decade.

and we so can control the future, choices we make now about the economy have a huge impact in the future... it's not all about next week. Decisions made this week will echo for generations.

We can control it to some extent, head, in our voting choices, political activism and some personal decisions.

But if you want to spend time being depressed, by all means explore living in Brazil, India or China. Perhaps with your skill set you can get a job in one of these locations that will lead to a better lifestyle than you can obtain here.

Oh good grief. Get a grip.

You've got your health! (I hope.) And your lovely children.

Stop watching the news. It makes one so much happier. Go on, live on a diet of CBeebies.

I don't know about the other two countries, but if you want to live in India, be prepared to accept corruption and beggers on the street, who are no doubt in a worse off position than you. If you want to go to a country where you'll be rich and sitting in a car with AC, watching these poor children in the sweltering heat begging for money then that's fine. As long as YOU'RE not depressed about YOU'RE circumstances in the current financial climate. .

kytti I can't stop watching the news, it's my job - for now

oooh - feel a bit sorry for you then. I love being uninformed. (Well, I do read the news on the BBC, but try to avoid broadcasts.)

sadly not only do I watch the news alot for work, but I also have to work with economics reporters who know much more of the situation than I can pretend to know. I don't know the proper lingo but basically we're fucked.

"Is no one else depressed about the state we're in? "

No, because personally I'm not in a 'state', despite what's happening elsewhere. I can't solve the nation's problems or the Eurozone crisis even if I wanted to so there's no point fretting about it. But I can look out for myself and my family, make us less vulnerable to any changes coming down the pipe and make a few contingency plans ... something I've done all my adult life.

I've stopped reading newspapers and watching the news so much because they are depressing. Maybe if we could lift our heads out of the gloom more collectively and be a little more positive, that would make a difference?

"I don't know the proper lingo but basically we're fucked"

And did those people you work with predict the banking crisis? Did they predict the Eurozone problems? ... No... So why do you believe their prediction this time?

I hear ya headfairy. I believe Australia is looking on the Eurozone crisis from a happier place (though no doubt all the Ozzie MNers will be on to put me right now...).

I too have more or less stopped watching the news because I can't bear the doom-mongering. And I'm afraid that while I reserve a special place for the bankers in my 21st century Inferno, the media have quite a lot to answer for too in all this, IMO.

cogito actually quite a few of the journos I work with did predict lots of what's happened. Lots of people predicted the sub prime crisis in the US which was the start of the downturn.

Sadly I can't avoid the news as it's part of my work. The thing that depresses me most is I can see the mistakes of the late 70s and early 80s being made all over again. Maybe I am being overly dramatic, but all I can see is the dependence on benefits being increased further through cuts to education funding, increased tuition fees, wholesale redundancies in industries with very little being done to create new jobs for those people and giving them the training to be able to do those jobs. And with benefits being cut so drastically (I understand the benefits system has to change, not arguing against that) and more people becoming dependant on benefits, and tax receipts falling as people lose their jobs I can only see things spiralling downwards. In the 80s we created the service industry and the financial industry to replace the manufacturing industry in this country. What are we going to do now to create jobs for the next two decades?

And yes, plenty of people were predicting the crash before it came, it's just that most people didn't want to hear the words 'unsutainable' in relation to the price of their homes. DP was working in a bank at the time (not as a banker, I hasten to add) and he was well aware of what was happening, despite being in no way an expert in the field. Everyone he worked with knew what was happening.

So headfairy when you say essentially we are stuffed what do you mean exactly? How do you think things will play out?

Midnightexpress - and what are they saying now?

I agree, Cognito.

cortina I meant in the context of what we're setting up for the future. Huge cuts to public services will leave our infrastructure woefully inadequate for our needs. If you don't maintain these things it become too expensive to catch up...

We've seen wholesale redundancies in industries we pretty much invented over the past two decades, service industries and the public sector. Unless we are seriously careful about making damn sure those people who have got specific skills that quite possibly aren't that transferrable I can see us creating yet another swathe of people who end up being career benefit claimants. At just a time when benefits are being cut.

We have lowest levels of social mobility since the war, social mobility is a big indicator of future GDP growth. Unless someone gets very serious about taking all those people who've made redundant and getting them quickly in to relevant training we are going to see some serious problems developing in the next 20 years. We have to decide where our next boom industry is going to be and do some serious work developing it.

You can't make swathes of public servants redundant and then expect them to find jobs in factories if a) they don't have the training relevant to those factories and b) those factories don't exist.

Cortina, as far as I know, much the same as what headfairy is saying. The bad debts that caused the credit crunch in the first place are still bad debts - they are still there, and only a sustained period of growth could alter that (assuming that the debtors didn't accumulate more debt).

Could you move to Brazil and find work there? It doesn't seem a particularly daft idea to move there if things here arent working out well for you at the moment, and you feel theyre going to get worse and you'll be out of a job soon. Is your particular sector big in Brazil? DH does business with Brazilian companies, and they certainly seem to be doing well at the moment.

Headfairy-

I can see where you are coming from. I work in Brazil and China and the sense of optimism and possibility of a young population and a rapidly growing economy defiantly makes coming back to the UK seem like coming back to yesterday's land.

That said, these countries have no shortage of people so you would have to have an idea that your particular skills could be parlayed into value, and also that you at this stage in your life have the energy and drive to go for it in a highly comparative environment with lots of people having the same idea as you.

I will definately tell my kids to go East and go South, but I'm not sure I'd be up for making the move myself at this stage.