To think that financially, Covid hasn't changed much for many people.

[blueblueblue101]

I keep hearing that we are in a recession that will be the longest and deepest in history. Yet when I look around, no one seems to be financially hit. Plenty of people going out for their meal out to help out. People still able to afford holidays. No one around me has been made redundant and no one I know seems to be remotely concerned about what the future holds in regards to finances Meanwhile, I am eaten up with worry that we'll lose our jobs our home etc.

@Manolin

Retail was already in denial over the future.

Consumers were moving to Amazon etc long before 2019. Covid-19 will accelerate and introduce methods of home delivery and local manufacturing. Covid-19 is not the cause, but a catalyst in the retail sector. Let's get that right.

A lot of habits have been changed, and this is affecting businesses.The obvious example is the shift in retail to home delivery. Its screwing up business's sales models and how they are set up entirely

Statements like the above, made without context, are of no value. They need to be made in the context of general business evolution and not Covid-19. That poster was not wrong, though the bigger truth is people and habits change over time. Consumers react to change and they also drive it. Successful businesses smell the winds of change. Change happens - it is in us and is part of life because we live on this spherical rock that is always spinning (it is rocket science as they say ).

It is better to call it evolution.

Society and businesses have been changing for years and certainly the last 150 years or so since the industrial revolution. That is why today Tesla overtook Walmart in market value. Investors feel a company that looks to electric vehicles and green energy battery storage as being that which will produce greater returns in future over retail shops. Tesla and similar is where the money is. By implication more people will be involved supporting that sector which will create structural long term wealth and jobs. Show me a financial journalist that has not paid a bill since March 2020 on the back of a Tesla column. Change is also why WPP, the largest advertising agency in the world slumped in value by 50% in just 12 months only relatively recently. It did not wake up to the reality that old style advertising has been overtaken by the likes of Instagram and social influencers. So it now has to change and adapt.

Each of us are really just a bug on a spinning spherical rock with the benefit of oxygen, water, sunlight and a lifelong supply of detritus and worms, bees and stuff that provide food. These things just come to us as gifts. There is no order to it all, it just happens and we best adapt ourselves to it, as a species and as individuals. And we do well on both counts.

In the short term for our species it is a mixed picture. The Covid-19 virus is as much a part of Life on this spherical rock as has been tsunamis, evil-Hitler and key-hole surgery. It is all the mixture of 'stuff'. It is messy as Obama says. But it is not all doom and gloom. In my work I see massive new investment across many sectors and that has continued throughout this year, albeit at a slower pace not because of lack of will, but for the sheer mechanics of getting people used to Zoom or Teams. Now how many people will those companies need to take on I wonder, to adapt to OUR change.......

I have seen the following only today in my work. A manufacturing software company receiving an investment of £14m which will partly go on 35 new staff full time including training over the next 36 months. A publishing and training organisation being fully-subscribed for £5m for investment in new titles, new manuals and live professional development packages that will produce another 17 jobs. An investment in four green energy production sites of £18m that will safeguard the design, manufacturing, professional services and finance jobs for another 30 people - the icing on the cake is that 3 local authority employees have been offered jobs if they wish to go to the private sector. It is Friday night and I do not want to look at any more until Monday.

This is what I see. Facts, not hearsay.

I have said it before here under different circumstances. The greatest threat we face is not a virus. The greatest threats we face are threefold.

Firstly - we need to learn to live with less because climate change will enforce constraints upon us that make Covid-19 feel like 'chicken feed'.

Secondly - whatever we live with needs to adapt into responsible capitalism so that wealth in whatever form it is created (money, food or health) is fairly distributed and not by just by the whim of parliament as we know it.

Thirdly - and this is the biggie - we need leadership that combines BOTH of the above.

There are some really harsh realities coming and coming all too soon.

Climate change means the planet can not support an ever increasing population. Not only that, but parts of the world will become increasingly hostile to human life. This is combined with an elite able to afford more and an ever increasing number of desparate people wanting to escape a future which is restricted to increasing premature death.

Add on this technology which means populations at home are now also 'surplus to requirements' and you start to get a picture where human rights are dispensable to those with power.

Democracy becomes obslete in this dynamic because it becomes about controlling the masses rather than allowing participation because there is no benefit to those with money and power to allow this anymore.

In this context, if you think the future is anything but grim for a great majority of people you are not paying attention.

It has financially effected my family for the worse. DHs business gone. Daughters job no longer exists. Son in law, returned after furlough to be made redundant not long after. I'm lucky I've got a job that there will always be demand for, I'm the only one left with a job and worried how financially and emotionally this is going to effect us. I have friends who are the opposite and have saved significantly due to covid.

I'm currently better off due to reduced commuting costs, not going on a fancy holiday abroad, less impulse shopping when out and about and not going out much. However I know a lot of the companies that are clients of my business are struggling, so we aren't able to sell quite as much, so I wouldn't be surprised if there are redundancies in my industry next year which is worrying. I also have friends in industries such as travel who have lost their jobs already and have struggled to find anything. Perhaps you don't have friends in these industries. But I do think you are being very short sighted. A lot of businesses are currently being propped up by the furlough scheme and I think when that ends we will really start seeing the problems.

Often a ripple effect with the full effects not becoming clear until much later.

@BK187

Often a ripple effect with the full effects not becoming clear until much later.

If you aren't actively frightened reading this thread, you should be. People do not understand where this runaway train is headed.

It's coming

Often a ripple effect with the full effects not becoming clear until much later.

Yes, exactly, the economy is interconnected. I keep saying this. Friend works in IT, he says he’s safe but this week they’ve announced pay cuts to try and minimise redundancies. It’s because whilst the amount of ongoing clients is ok (they sign long contracts of a few years), the amount of new clients has halved over the last 6 months - non essential upgrades are being postponed.

There are also companies taking advantage of the situation to cost reduce now, even though they don't have to.
There is a massive, international, London based engineering/architecture company that's doing redundancies for management, but have also outsourced 95% of it's admin to the Philippines. That's HR, PAs, administrators etc. Why pay someone London wages, when you can hire someone for silly money if you outsource

The government has learned two (cynical) lessons from 2008:

Economic recession can be amortised over many years by borrowing huge and printing money. This will pretty much ensure that we will not enjoy normal growth for the foreseeable future.

Zero interest rates and pumping money into the economy will inflate asset prices, driving the spending of the asset rich. Meanwhile those earlier on in their career or old and living on an annuity, will not be able to achieve economic success.

I don’t think that this new economics is in any way a solution, as it enshrines economic inequalities and makes social mobility far harder. However, I guess it does even out the anaemic growth that we seem to be capable of.

We haven't got started yet.

How many renters are in rent arrears?
How many used the mortgage holiday?
How many will lose their jobs?
What % normal spending is happening in your local high street?
How many weddings, banquets, cruises and holidays are booked for 2021?

We are at the start.

.. fed up with people who think nothing has changed

That's possibly because it looks to me as if the MSM seem to now to be hardly be bothering reporting job losses unless it's several thousand at one swoop at one company (and preferably a High Street name).

Down at the "noise" level there are lots of jobs going, chunks of a hundred here and a couple of hundred there that now seem to barely warrant air time, bandwidth or column inches.

The economy is being slowly hollowed out.

It’s made us better off. I changed departments in work just before lockdown so my earnings increased. My husband no longer has to use the train for work, he’s working from home now so we have none of his commuting costs. I worked from home anyway.
Our jobs are both in financial services and are both very secure and we are very lucky.

@blueblueblue101

I keep hearing that we are in a recession that will be the longest and deepest in history. Yet when I look around, no one seems to be financially hit. Plenty of people going out for their meal out to help out. People still able to afford holidays. No one around me has been made redundant and no one I know seems to be remotely concerned about what the future holds in regards to finances Meanwhile, I am eaten up with worry that we'll lose our jobs our home etc.

I know 14 people that have been made redundant from my section at work and can guarantee there will be more to come around either Christmas or just after. Outside of work I know people that have too.

Family member has had salary cut by 20%. I fortunately avoided a 20% cut at work. They based it on a figure per year that people earned and I was under that by 10 quid, otherwise I'd have lost thousands.

It's all very real.

You'll not be saying this op when your council tax increases.

You don't know anyone yet who has been affected. Let's change your statement to that.

I think a few hobbies might disappear as well. If anyone does horse riding for example, many schools may be closing soon as they won't be able to afford winter. I wonder as well how many leisure centres will close because councils can't afford them. I know of one that already closed before covid because they couldn't afford it anymore. Zoos may close because of winter. Other outdoor activities may close because they have had no income to survive over winter.

You've not seen the worst of it yet op.

I saved money in lockdown which is good because I’ll be redundant from next Monday. Unless I can find something quickly, we won’t be going out to restaurants.

I started mat leave during lock down (fortunately secure job in NHS to go back to) but my DPs successful business has all but gone as largely relied on European travel so massively reduced income since March. Several friends/their partners have been made redundant and applying for any job going but so are, in some cases, 100s of other people in the same position. I think some of the impact has been initially masked as people have saved during lockdown, cancelled holidays etc and this month people are enjoying eating out by taking advantage of the eat out scheme. I strongly suspect during the winter we will start to see the full impact and it won’t be a pretty picture.

The traditionally what you'd class as secure jobs are starting to be impacted too from what I've seen.

I work with a lot of Housing Associations and Local Authorities. One HA (it's pretty big) has just had a round of redundancies and another 2 I work with are just starting a headcount reduction.

Also one LA in London has just put the project we are delivering on hold, as they are reducing headcount in the department we are working with by 25%.

I don't think any sector is going to be untouched by this.

Well I've lost my job and that had impacted "fun" purchases, days out, clothing etc. Normal bills are paid as usual.

I don't think any sector is going to be untouched by this.

Nope. It will push wages down even in sectors doing well - unless you have very particular skills, which are highly sort after and in short supply. Companies will find it hard to justify high wages to share holders.

The driver being the number of people seeking work and people simply having less money to spend.

Its the issue about when 1000 jobs go in manufacturing thats 5000 other jobs in the local community also at risk due to the supply chains. But it also works in terms of jobs going in office management and spreading to everything from holidays, hospitality, office supplies, it services, right down to the things you impluse buy in the Aldi aisle of randomness. People simply wont be able to afford to. So you get a chain reaction contraction affect.

Furlough is about trying to stop that, but in reality as long as covid restrictions exist and people continue to be unwilling to socialise, it merely exacerbates the problem. It doesn't help that those with the most disposal money are retired, and perhaps health wise more vulnerable and therefore reluctant to return to normal. Nor does it help that this pattern is also problematic in terms of how a shrinking economy screws pension savings. And how much money is effectively tied up in property, more so in the uk than many other places in Europe.

This is also where the minimum wage actually starts to become problematic. There reaches a point where costs mean people can't afford things and jobs cannot be created due to the threshold.

I think we will see a lot of illegally employed (hidden from the tax man of course) because of the desperation or moves by the government to reduce the minimum wage in some wage.

This of course is all part of a race to the bottom but i can see it being justified politically in a situation where we have very high levels unemployment.

Everything about the entire situation from the uk having particularly high levels of inequality to begin with, high levels of obesity, high levels of dense population in cities, more deprived areas, coming up to the end of eu transition, particularly high levels of personal debt, a government who dont really know what they are doing / have massive levels of personal conflicts of financial interest, climate issues, etc etc I could go on make the whole covid crisis a particularly acute almost perfect storm for the uk in ways that are not parallelled elsewhere in the world.

It's not good.

This so the biggest issue faced by the 3 million people who have been left out of support by this government, nobody gives a shit because they are alright.

I'm on a forum called excluded where we are having to talk to suicidal business owners who are loosing everything, trying to save staff jobs, people using Foodbanks, not able to feed children etc.

Limited company directors, the ones that employ 13m people no support, self employed with the 50/50 rule, excluded, anyone who set up their own business in 2020 excluded.

But as long as everyone is eating out then that's ok! 🙄

@mellowgreenspring

I might have a look at that forum. I think furlough was a blunt instrument and a lot of people fell through the cracks. My friend was made redundant just before lockdown - she had never been unemployed before and had lined up four interviews, she’s post grad professionally qualified. All the interviews were cancelled and she wasn’t entitled to furlough. All she could claim was JSA at £75 a week, with a time limit of 26 weeks. She’s desperately sought work, even applying for supermarket / delivery roles but couldn’t get anything. She’s finally found a role via a friend / former colleague. She fell through the cracks too, she’s very disappointed, having paid in via PAYE all her working life and being made redundant through no fault of her own. The government imposed lockdown stopped her finding a new role but the government didn’t support her.

Thanks @Miseryl

I’m CS too but I didn’t know there were areas with no compulsory redundancies.

Mellowgreenspring

I disagree with your comment

I have been made redundant in the past
After paying into the system for many years
I received my redundancy money, plus £75 contributions based job seekers allowance
I was fortunate to find new employment quickly

That is how the system functions

People only receive more if they meet certain requirements

Are you complaining, that your friend should have been furloughed or that she should have received more ?

@Shiverywinterbottom

It’s made us better off. I changed departments in work just before lockdown so my earnings increased. My husband no longer has to use the train for work, he’s working from home now so we have none of his commuting costs. I worked from home anyway. Our jobs are both in financial services and are both very secure and we are very lucky.

Really? Are you at a junior level?

FS is going to be hammered

@blueblueblue2020 - this is quite a smug post. All I can say is lucky you.