Can anyone remember the 2008 crash?

[Camouflags]

I was too young but can anyone tell me what it felt like before it crashed? Why did it crash? What crashed?!
Personally how did it affect you? Is this worse so far?

I remember it as we were trying to sell our flat to move to a house. Bought the flat in 2005 for 165k, was valued in 2008 at 145k. Our new build street was emptying as people were repossessed. We eventually sold in 2011 (still at 145k). That didn't feel good.

This is worse

Yes. I was made redundant from a job I loved and spent the following 9 months temping and barely making ends meet.

I remember getting rip roaringly drunk straight after that redundancy meeting.

This will be way worse

Oh, and this is much worse. Life still went on in 2008.

The 2008 crash was nothing like this! I was 34 and working in London in the finance industry and it didn't really affect me personally at all.

This is infinitely worse, the reason the banks were bailed out was to prevent something like this happening, and it only just worked.

The economy is going to be a far bigger problem than Covid.

I work in Financial Services and so the 2008 crash is very clear to me.

One of the core causes was a process called securitisation. This is where a group of assets that produce an income are pooled together and bonds sold which pay out an income based on the returns from those assets.

What people began to realise was that the quality of the assets in the securitisation pools were much worse than expected so the returns couldn’t be justified. Northern Rock for example was heavily involved in Mortgage Backed Securitisation. So people realised that some of these financial institutions had much weaker balance sheets than expected.

That happened overnight in 2008 and over a year lots of people lost jobs and homes over the period of a year. It took years to recover. What's happening now is immediate- people have lost everything overnight very fast and there are many unknowns. It's worse by far.

This is totally different. The 2008 crash was financial, it had huge impact, but nothing like as wholesale as this.

I’m getting a bit frustrated about how the economic impact looks to be handled here. A huge number of sectors look like they’re going to be decimated, but not because there’s anything wrong with the fundamentals of them, just because normal economic activity can’t function when people are on lock down.

Isn’t there a way of pressing pause on all economic transactions for a while? Give people enough money for food and basics and halt on everything else? It just seems so pointless to sit back and watch, say, the hospitality sector crash and burn and then we’ll have to build it all back up.

Yes, but the ones a bit earlier, late 80s, early 90s, did the damage for my peers. We boomed and bust, had high unemployment levels and also the Loadsa Money crowd.

We were all trying to buy, were encouraged to with easy mortgages and lots of cashback inducements, and then the housing marked crashed in 1991... despite what many people say about that not being 'bad' many of my peers had to hand their keys back to their mortgage lenders.

I have been told a few times in here that 'handing the keys back' didn't happen, but when you know people who had no other option you do wonder at the regional differnces on any recession!

So far right now, there are promises of financial aid when needed, which we didn't have back then, we stood or fell on our own ability to survive! But that's not surprising as back then it didn't happen to everybody... now it is!!

Isn’t there a way of pressing pause on all economic transactions for a while? I can only imagine that, once the initial chages are made by each country, there will be a global management system put in place for some things... we can only wait and see. They can't do everything at once, but soeone somehwere will be looking at the possibilities (the Wolrd Bank etc)

To be fair to the financial crisis, it could have been much, much worse. Very decisive action was taken in the nick of time. We were so close to a run on the banks, huge numbers of institutions collapsing.

I think it wasn’t prudent at the time to make it known that we so closely averted total meltdown, so it’s not fully acknowledged now.

They can't do everything at once, but soeone somehwere will be looking at the possibilities (the Wolrd Bank etc)

I hope so. Obviously the medical issues are more pressing.

Having said that, hundreds of thousands of retail jobs have already been lost in Ireland.

Yes, and the crash of October 1987

It all seemed unreal, and it was top story on the news. That’s the biggest difference this time - it is about the only other thing getting coverage, but it is far from the top story

Yes.
It was bad. Home value dropped by a third. Eventually sold it in 2015 still at a loss below the 2005 price we paid and that was after we had sunk over 100k into it completely renovating it with necessary things..eg replaced the roof and windows. Our retirement savings were halved. They had really only now started to get past where they were in 2007 and this latest crash will cut them by a third at least. Too scared to look up the accounts right now. To think of all the time lost and think that I am 15yrs older and no further towards saving for retirement than I was in 2005!, despite putting money aside every paycheck. I mean hundreds aside every month, thousands every year. For it all to just evaporate. It’s maddening.
If the markets do not rebound..say a V recovery...this will be worse than the 2008 crash and economic crisis.

Yes I work in financial services and we saw our world decimated overnight but I was lucky and didn’t loose my job. We got over that but I am not sure we can get over this as easily. The crash of 2008 was a slow burn for job losses as business collapsed over months and years. This is instant

This is worse.

Many people weren't personally affected or only slightly affected by the crash in 2008. For example renters who didn't lose their jobs carried on as normal and were fine.

I can't see any member of society not being directly affected by this crisis.

My old landlord bought my old house at the peak of prices in 2007 for 150k

he's just sold it for 130k

some places still haven't recovered fully yet (and he neglected the places never repairing anything so that didn't help)

I remember it because I got a promotion and a 16k payrise. We were renting, and dp’s (Now ex) job was stable, so we honestly really didn’t notice any difference. Except for our then 3 year old going around singing ‘we are going to the credit crunch’, and us all scratching our heads as to how he came up with that. But the reality was, it was always on the news, the credit crunch was always being talked about, so it was a good example of how children, even nursery age, pick up on more than we realise. Should also be a good reminder now when they are talking about the number of people getting ill and dying.

This is much worse.
Totally different but in terms of its impact you have to look at decimation of manufacturing in some towns in the early 80's. Billy Elliott shows this world well. Desperate poverty, police brutality, and no obvious way out for most young people living there. That was really shit. Also record repossessions and incredibly high unemployment.

I was on maternity leave and worked for RBS. This is way worse.

It's scary times. We had an offer on a house accepted last week. Realistically we'll have to put the whole thing on hold and see where we are when this blows over. Gutted, we finally are able to get on the property ladder and the entire economy collapses

2008 a lot of people lost jobs, but it really did not take long for employment to start climbing again. Basically it was an economic blip that was hard for some individuals, but not prolonged enough to fuck up society as a whole.