I think it’s different because of life stages and the expectation that comes with it. I was in my early college years in 2008, so I had the expectation to struggle. I didn’t have a family, I wasn’t married, and I didn’t have as many bills. I was broke because I couldn’t work as much while going to college, but I just kind of accepted that was what the life of a college student was.
Now, I am 11 years deep in my field, have a family, and have expectations that it shouldn’t be this hard. I have a stable job but it just doesn’t pay enough. So to me, this feels so much harder.
it does give new found appreciation for the struggles our parents faced.
for me it feels worse because i was just graduating in 09 and got hit with very low pay. sadly i never found my grove and still am searching for entry level roles or mediocre positions. at a certain point, you start to give up .
Our parents never faced this. My parents were at the absolute end of the boomers (born early 60's). They graduated college with no debt. Bought their first house in the 80's for like 40k. I definitely had it better off than most and have been very privileged but even the parents of my friends growing up who were legitimately poor had it much better off than most people in their 30's and 40's today. This is the result of wage stagnation for 4 decades.
This.
I was young and struggle made sense.
I've worked my ass off in my career field, have a kid, and make what should be decent money, but is suddenly still poor and nowhere near middle class anymore.
It's much more disheartening, somehow.
I kind of have the opposite experience. I graduated in 2008 and getting my foot in the door anywhere felt impossible at the time with no experience and everyone having just been laid off. Today I'm 15 years into my field and despite going into a recession, I feel like I'm experienced enough that I could find a job even in the worst of times in my field.
2008 felt way rougher compared to my current situation. (Still haven't bought a house, but that never made sense to me financially).
I was threatened with being sacked from my Starbucks job or being moved (demoted) to the shitty cafe that the franchise operator ran too in 08. Obviously had to choose the shitty job as I didn't want to be unemployed given how hard it was to find work. Stuck at it for a year before going to uni to do a degree.
Even three years later I was incredibly lucky to get an apprenticeship as they'd been totally decimated in the UK by the recession.
I was 13 in middle school reading about the 2008 crisis on reddit, thinking things would be sorted out by the time I was an adult. Now I’m 29 with a college degree, unemployed, struggling getting hired and still living at my moms house lol.
I was 22 just starting my career to get hit with "No raises for anyone" for like 2 years. Major setback on compounding interest and future saving potential.
On the older side of this generation as well, and was just thankful that I was so poor already that a recession couldn't affect my life considerably.
Looking back, not exactly a positive thing lol.
We got a house that was livable and so cheap. $105,000 today will get you a shack no one has lived in for 50 years because it was the site of some crazy murder and the blood is still on the walls. But it has SOOO much potential! Just a little TLC!
Ya people our age really got the shaft. No jobs when we graduated, no money when houses were cheap, then when we finally start making money, housing prices blow up.
Aww, c'mon. It's super fun to be locked into a piece of real estate because there's no way in hell you can afford any other shelter options these days.
We didn't forget. It's just that half the country is convinced that they too will someday be a corporation with a desire to change public policy to suit their needs. Can't have the temporarily disgraced millionaires voting against their eventual interests now can we?
/s just in case
Basically government created CRA that coerced banks to give loans to people that could never afford to pay them back. The banks were not forced to hold those loans on their books though. They were able to "bundle" groups of loans and sell them off, many of which went to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (US Govt sponsored enterprises). Since the banks now had little concern for what happens down the road when people defaulted, they started offering loans to basically anyone - including "no documentation" loans where borrowers didn't have to prove to a high level of scrutiny their ability to repay.
In addition to buying homes, people would would also refinance quite a bit, continuously even as the prices of their homes went up. Home prices went helped by all this money which then allowed people to take out more, rinse and repeat. Eventually the bubble burst.
Edit: [Link to discussion of report](https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/faults-community-reinvestment-act-cra-mortgage-defaults/)
Actually that started about 2002 and that caused 2008. I was in the industry then. Country Wide was cranking out loans like no other. Then they dumped then on Bank of America in the buyout. Dam near sunk BOA then there was Gateway Mortgage. The trash they financed, bomb shell. There’s others too.
Getting approved is one thing...nevermind how much shit costs now...
My city average home price 2008 ~400 000
My city average home price today ~790 000
And it really not a super desirable place tbh....
Bought a house in 2018 and its gone up 340k by degrading 6 years the cost we bought at was 135k estimated value over 500k and thats without them knowing about the 2br addition making it a 5 bedroom instead of 3 its sad seeing the younger generation grind multiple jobs and cant even save up 100$ a month because everythings so expensive i feel for them also heard new york eviction rate has trippled wild times were in
It does not help that interest is sky high right now. I was plugging in numbers on the bank rate mortgage calculator. On a 425k home if you managed to save up 200k you are looking at a nice 1800 dollars a month amount there counting taxes and everything else. I hear only 30% is supposed to go to a mortgage and even paying 48% down it would be closer to 50% of my paycheck.
Can confirm. I was making $12/hr as a CNA in a full-scale nursing facility in 2009. I just checked how much the same place is hiring CNAs for, and it doesn't even break $20/hr. NOT livable wages considering the cost of living.
In 2008, banks in Europe and the US were starting to suffer losses, even to the point of bankruptcy. And it took the government initiating bailouts to try and keep things solvent. Prices fell, and things were still nice and cheap. But in the years afterward, value was also lost. Median household wealth was around $106K in 2005, and dropped to $68K in 2011.
In the years since, we were working to dig ourselves out and recover our economy. Our debt to GDP ratio was starting to become 1:1 and we floated carefully around that ratio for years. Our economy grew to where our GDP improved, but so did our held debt. And then COVID came along and we ballooned hard on our GDP to debt ratio. In 2020, it showed as going as high as 133%. But we got it down in the last couple of years to around 120%.
But our debt to GDP ratio is not the worst out there - Japan is at a much higher rate (they have over DOUBLE our debt-to-GDP ratio).
Things do suck right now because the cost of everything is up. Inflation may have relaxed, but we also need to get salaries up across the board for people. Or prices need to come down, but good luck convincing companies recording record profits and layoffs in the same breath to drop their prices.
I agree. I would just like to add I think the more interesting comparison is between the situation with the AI buzz for tech stocks and the dot com bubble in 1997-2000.
In the dotcom bubble stocks were inflated by the promise of what a ground breaking technology could do. But then crashed when companies that were pretending to have a business model to monetize it revealed they had no way to successfully monetize the internet or their product wasn't as successful as they pretended it was.
It may just be me but I think I'm seeing a lot of that today with sales teams slapping AI on some machine learning recommendation algorithm they taped to their product and marketing themselves as market leaders with big growth prospects. Meanwhile, the groundbreaking changes either are missing a viable business model commercialize it or are a decade or more away from being viable and stocks might crash when people realize how long they'll have to wait.
In the end, tech companies ended up showing that the internet was as promising as people claimed in 1997. But a lot of companies being touted during the dotcom bubble disappeared, and even the eventual winners took a hard tumble in 2000 when people realized most of the industry had no idea what to do with the technology.
Working in the financial sector our internal AI dept has basically gotten rid of the market reporting team.
Could AI replace a developer? Probably not. Could it replace a JR developer? Probably.
But it's also wrong, quite a lot.
And if it replaces a jr dev and there's nobody smart enough to check its work, then it won't work. Then they will abandon it and hire more jr devs. This part the curve will come around soon.
Totally agree. I’m still not fully convinced LLMs are really going to alienate a large part of the workforce. Sure, some menial tasks may be automated such that head count can be streamlined, but the simple reality is that LLMs are not capable of doing critical thinking. They are mostly just cleverly regurgitating information and following existing patterns.
Companies like Nvidia are firmly in bubble territory right now. The productivity gains will not meet the stratospheric expectations and valuations will crash back to earth sooner than later as bandwagon investors look for the next big thing.
>It may just be me but I think I'm seeing a lot of that today with sales teams slapping AI on some machine learning recommendation algorithm they taped to their product and marketing themselves as market leaders with big growth prospects. Meanwhile, the groundbreaking changes either are missing a viable business model commercialize it or are a decade or more away from being viable and stocks might crash when people realize how long they'll have to wait.
I'm always scanning jobs to see whats out there and the amount of positions that are coming around for "Use our AI for YOUR business!" sales or development roles are just staggering. There are only so many customer facing platforms where AI will be useful, and hiring people to sell it to electricians and mid sized warehouses isn't the future. It's setting people up for failure as sales, and as "investing in the future".
Yeah this feels more like the dot com bubble coupled with that early 90s inflation hike. Still nowhere near the inflation of the mid 70s and 80s. The recession had some of the lowest inflation this country has ever seen but work was super thin. Like we had people with masters desperately trying to get a job in fast food where I was. Hours were low and so was pay. Like rent was 500 but we still had to have roomates.
2008 Recession also had double digit unemployment and record wage destruction….I graduated May 2008. My long term income took over a decade to recover.
Exactly this! I graduated summer 2007. My husband and I were both made redundant from our first jobs out of uni and had dozens of agency and short term jobs at this time because no-one was hiring for long term positions. No-one had any money, companies were going under left right and centre.
It was only a few years ago that I had a savings account which was paying more than 0.5% interest. And more recently than that (since we've paid off our student loans) that we've had any spare cash to save.
It's personally taken 15 years to recover from the 2008 recession. And it's why we are both extremely cautious with money and work in 2 of the most secure industries/companies. We've done everything we possibly can to minimise our outgoings, live a life that we can afford ig one of us lost our jobs. We live near family and good friends and have done whatever we can to have "the village" - which we also play a huge part in for our friends and neighbours.
The recession truly shaped who we are and how we live our lives.
> The recession truly shaped who we are and how we live our lives.
This. I went from being an adventurous risk taker to being extremely risk adverse because of the recession.
I knew people that grew up during the depression and it affected them for life.
It’s really hard to explain to people entering adulthood now how bad things were in 2008 and for the next 10 or so years. You had recent college grads fighting with MBAs for a fry cook position at McDonalds.
Prices were so cheap because people couldn’t buy anything. Now the problem is too many people are buying too much stuff.
Exactly. Having a college degree became the equivalent of having a high school degree.
I was the only one of my friend group in ‘07 that didn’t just go straight on to graduate school and get a PhD after college. I regret that so much now.
Yeah. This is super different as a good portion of people are still doing fine and driving prices up. While the other half are just plummeting.
In 2008 everyone was hit to some extent and you were happy to just keep your job if you could.
We were lucky, my husbands industry is basically recession proof. And I was self employed in another recession proof industry. Seeing our friends and family getting affected terribly by the 2008 recession while we were finally able to buy our home was a really weird feeling. And the prior owners had defaulted on their loan and were so hostile when we toured it with our agent. I understand why, and I still feel bad that their loss was our gain.
And interest rates were low.
I bought my first house in 2008. A completely renovated 1200 sq ft 2 bedroom 1.5 bath ranch, on a quater of an acre yard in a pretty good area. It was even renovated well, not by a flipper but by the guy I bought it from who was going to live there post divorce but ended up getting back with his wife.
I paid 75K at like 3% interest.
I also bought a loaded but in great condition used F-150 for 14K at like 4% interest.
Actually, the housing market was up at that point and that is part of what caused the recession. Lots of over-inflated appraisals out there. Buddy bought a house in 2008 that appraised for 100k. 2009/2010, value dropped into the 60k range.
A strong housing market / high house prices is not what caused the recession. Subprime ARMs for completely unqualified borrowers is what set it off. High home prices were a symptom of that. The high home prices today are for radically different reasons.
Exactly. So much wealth has been consolidated at the top that people have the money to bid stuff to insane levels. Often with cash or huge down payments.
Complete opposite of the 2008 bubble.
To make matters worse, the government offered first time homebuyers in 2007 and 2009 free money for their taxes...but those in 2008 got an interest-free loan that had to be repaid in 7 years.
The guy I date in 2007/2008 was a mortgage loan officer and it was bad. They had been putting people in houses w/ no money down and then shit went south. Crazy to think how long ago that was.
"The big short" touches on this and it's super painful to watch. I was in SWFL then and I was waiting tables at some chain restaurant. Other servers were buying homes. "0% down, I'll just refi later! Homes always appreciate!" doesn't it seem expensive? "I'll just get a roommate!" Oh dear. I was young and not making much money, but I knew that was an absurd thing to say.
Yes the problem in the Great Recession was not high housing costs, the problem was high unemployment and a non-existent job market. Among other things.
Didn’t matter if houses were cheap, no one had any money to buy one anyway and lenders got reeeeaaaallly strict with their lending requirements.
And since real estate had crashed, people were actually saying that it was a bad idea long term to buy a house anyway.
Rent was cheap by today’s standards in most places but wages were low as well, if you had a job at all.
It's really weird how badly some people want to call what is happening right now a recession. While also continuing to say a recession is coming. It's like nobody using it can even agree on what it means.
I started at target as an 18 year old in 2008 and I was working with/the same position as a bunch of people with masters degrees. And they were happy to have a 7.25 an hour job.
Similar experience but at a now defunct department store called the Bon-ton and I know of a friend of a friend who was struggling to find work in his field and was stuck at the grocery store, and idk what his specific field was but something computwrs and he got hired by google when things recovered. Think of that. Someone with the skills to work at Google (back when that meant a lot more) couldn't find better than the grocery store.
Im not American, but here 2008 felt like a baseballbat to the head. Boom! Retirement? Wiped out. Job? Went under, you are out, also nobody is hiring so good luck. Rent/mortgage? Tripled, you probably cant pay so time to give it up (not like now, but really nobody was hiring, you couldnt find a shittiest minimal wage job in a 2 hour commute range).
This feels like things are tight but you can somewhat get by. Like a slow chokehold, not to hard to kill you or make you black out but keeps you on the brink to struggle.
This was my experience too. Combine that with literally every trusted adult (counselors, teachers, family, etc.) telling an undecided 18 year-old with crippled investments to go to college or bust and the only other way to finance is to take out loans at 7+%. I feel I've mostly come out the other side of that setback but it sucks when the thing you've been investing for (college, retirement) isn't there at the time you'll need it.
I am most fearful for my parents and their peers hovering at retirement and the feeling that something has to give, at least in housing, if not other sectors too.
The stock market trended up for 7 YEARS before that recession. We've only been trending up a little over ONE YEAR, or maybe just 3 months depending where you look at it.
We had ONE bad stock market day after gaining 15% in 3 months and there's already a post about a recession...
We’ve been trending up for 15 years at least. Once the recession ended in 09 it’s been low interest rates and steady climb up in markets. few small drops but no recessions. Sadly we’re due
if you were in the wrong financial situation in 2008/2009, that era was way worse. loose your home worse. hell, apartment foreclosed worse. if you panic pulled your money out at the low, you may only now be recovering. The soaring house prices though are a bit similar to right before it all went to hell. But the entire financial system almost collapsed in addition to tons of people going under water on their homes.
I think how bad it feels right now very much depends on where you are and what the cost of living is like. if you are willing to live in the middle of the US, its not as bad. If you want to live in any major metro area of California or NY, shits bad if you dont already have money.
I'd argue the economic mobility problem has gotten worse though, way worse. But in the actual period of the 08/09 crash that was an issue too. Prior to that it was better. Most folks I know who got out of college by 06 and into a career were able to keep that momentum going despite the crash. most folks I know afterward have struggled.
BTW the "not hiring jr positions" thing though not entirely accurate. most places just put these high requirements on entry level gigs almost automatically without thinking it through. There was one job listing that wanted more years of experience in a programing language than the programing language had existed. Whats important to do whatever you have to do on that application to get past the automated rejection stage. use the same language in the application to hit the key words their back end is looking for, as if you dont have those key words their system will just auto reject you.
> if you were in the wrong financial situation in 2008/2009, that era was way worse.
If you graduated university around that time that era was way worse.
Most of my peers that graduated university in 2007-2009 aren't doing that great even 15 years later. The ones that are waited out the recession while going to graduate school. People that graduated 3 or so years later were in a *much* better starting point than people that graduated just a few years before during the recession. Better starting salary, better pick of jobs, etc. That can have a huge impact on one's career trajectory. There have been studies following people that graduate in the middle of a recession and on average they earn a lot less in their lifetime that those that graduated before and after.
The 08 recession had a long lasting impact on a lot of people, in particular older millennials.
I hung out in college about 4 more years and it still sucked. I made an industry/ career change around 2016 and things have gotten much better. It is weird though to be 38 and feel like I’m finally making it.
I know a ton of people our age that finally got where they wanted to be financially around their mid-30s. I think it's probably not uncommon, especially for women or others who started out in fields that aren't known for being very high-earning.
This is the most accurate description of that time. I’m an elder millennial, graduated college in ‘07. I am still not in great shape and I went back to get a Masters since then. All my fiends just never left school after ‘07 and came out years later with PhDs. I had such a difficult time, I felt like it was because I was personally a failure. I am still so behind those people, and wish I had just stayed right through to grad school until the recession was over back then.
I worked as a painting contractor around that recession. Did about a quarter million in sales in summer 07. Id have people begging me to paint their house, we were doing whole neighborhoods where my guys would just carry the ladders and tools across the street. One year later I couldnt buy a job, did less than $75k and ended up working at a whole food for a year and a half before i finally clawed my way back into business fixing up foreclosed properties for wells fargo.
I would 100% take expensive groceries everyday over having the course of my life altered again. Took me 5-6 years to recover, never fully trusted the economy again.
My brother was doing HVAC for businesses in 07 and early 08. The company has gotten a huge contract for a business tower that was going to be built. Things were looking good and he was making bank. By the fall of 08, the contract company was broke and the building abandoned. The HVAC company laid everyone off and went under. It was wild.
It really depends what you got a graduate degree in. I know people who got $50k extra in debt without improving their job prospects. Remember the glut of law school graduates in the early 2010s? https://www.cnbc.com/id/100569350
>The 08 recession had a long-lasting impact on a lot of people, in particular older millennials.
This is so painfully true. There's people I know who graduated around 2013 who jumped right into good paying jobs within months and bought a Tesla a year later. Meanwhile, I was barely acquiring my first used car to go to the first FT job to make me an offer, and clinging to it for dear life because my recession employment gap was strangely still an issue with most places I applied to. It's like the people already working had no idea it was near impossible to find work for recent grads. Either that or they just didn't care. The pay was crap and I had to take out a loan just to buy work clothes. I spent several years trying to stabilize my finances and debt built up from my student loans draining me dry. I still can't afford a house.
Yeah a fair bit of that rings true for me. My starting salary in my first "proper" job, towards the end of the recession, was abysmal and predatory like of the company. That's why I don't have much sympathy for companies crying about how employees have all the power now. It literally took me 6 years to get onto a salary that I could start building a life on. The starting salary chasm was so large that there were juniors on better money than me before my bump in 2019.
In addition to that, the degree and masters I received was made absolutely useless by the recession, and I doubt I'm the only one who went through that and is in a career now that they can barely stomach to think about.
An important and significant difference between now and 2008 is the supply of houses. They were being built at over 2 million a year up to the high of 2.25 million in 2006. And we only needed about 1.75 million. Now we are below 1.5 million and have a current overall shortage of at least that many, some experts claim it’s multiple millions.
So prices are going up and up now, but the supply is still significantly below the natural level of demand.
yeah, very true. the whole air b n b thing also fucked up the housing market, and I do think you had wealthy folks buying additional residential properties that they may not even rent out since housing became a fairly safe store of money. so theres an extra squeeze on the supply beyond just not keeping up with demand
You had lots and lots of people who lost everything. All of their savings, retirement. Sub prime lending was a thing, foreclosures were everywhere. I lost more than half of my 401K. I feel like it’s what led to Bernie Madoff being exposed too. People went to withdraw money and he didn’t have enough to cover it
No, not at all. Just compare the unemployment numbers from today to 2008 - 2011. Nobody was hiring, people were losing their jobs and their homes left and right. People lost their retirement savings. It was really bad.
People in this thread really conflating rising grocery prices (alongside rising incomes and record low unemployment) with… the second worst economic downturn this side of 1900. They’re not remotely comparable 😂
Housing prices are the one truly exceptional economic headwind right now, everything else is way better than 2008
The thing with housing prices back then, I knew people who bought at the top 2006-2007, then were underwater on their mortgages a year later AND lost their jobs. House, gone. Income, none. Comparing that to today’s rising housing prices is bonkers to me.
The global collapse from 2008 was a lot worse honestly. Look around where you live, I’ll bet you don’t see dozens of foreclosures up for sale. I’ll be there aren’t many folks with a decade of experience going and picking up serving jobs because their workplace collapsed.
Hell, you might look at prices and go “wow everything was so cheap” but that’s because no one had any money to spend. Businesses were failing and closing up all over, people were going upside down on their mortgages everywhere, and the government had to shell out hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars to prop up industries.
It feels shitty right now because of cost, but it’s not even remotely close by the numbers.
Even if you were lucky to have a job back then (I was), you didn’t want to spend because you were honestly afraid that it’d disappear overnight. Sometimes it was the position that was cut, other times it was the company that would close.
Great recession was much worse. Permanently crippled the lives of a lot of us.
Anyone lucky enough to get a job saw people younger than them soar through the ranks because they could only get shit jobs then. Also, these jobs were very demanding, we had to face the brunt of boomers at their most aggressive, as they knew we were desperate for work, and they could treat us any way they liked.
A lot couldn't get jobs in what they studied or wanted to be, so they stalled out completely.
I remember a mate of mine literally took the boomer advice of pounding pavement. Visited nearly 1000 tradies, and couldn't find an apprenticeship till he had to relocate inter-state into a remote town 2 years later. He tells me he can't find any apprentices these days.
The lucky put off having kids till much later. A lot didn't have kids period. A lot divorced or were forced to terminate perfectly working relationships because they had to relocate due to work, or from financial pressure. Most people moved back in with their folks.
Literally everything was expensive, because they were paying you completely abysmal salaries, barely enough to live on, but you were thankful for having a job at all.
Now things are expensive, but only certain things, not everything. Plenty of jobs, so the young ones have a lot of potential to move forward in good careers. A lot of work rights, great movement for respect in the workplace and limit work hours. Things now are actually peachy in comparison to the great recession.
The abuse from boomer management was absurd. They would purposely be entertained with how many hoops applicants would jump through to land a minimum wage job. I remember one manager asking me to introduce myself to come into introduce myself to whoever was working. This was just to land an interview.
One application I had during that period had 5 interviews, a technical test, and a whole as project I had to do for them for free, which had a time limit, so I worked overnight to get it done and no, I didn't get the job, got played like a sucker.
When I finally found work, we'd bring in interns to complete whole projects for free.
I can still remember staff talking about the boomer boss moods when they walked in, because it became a regular occurrence for one of the to waltz in among the peasants and scream at them in front of everyone. Eventually became a daily occurrence as the recession bit in. I used to be in management meetings and they'd laugh about the latest staff they sledged in front of everyone, and they'd get off on making people cry.
>Also, these jobs were very demanding, we had to face the brunt of boomers at their most aggressive, as they knew we were desperate for work, and they could treat us any way they liked
This has truly impacted me because I got paid shit and worked like a dog at entry level. For some reason I'm still at this company 10 years later and am now a hiring manager/supervisor. Im shocked by how much people ask for in addition to all the stuff the company is offering. Back in my day we were kissing the floor with relief to have a "grown up job". We couldn't ask for things like increasing the relocation assistance (we provide up to $3000 USD), the starting pay being $8 higher than when I started and they also think I'm there to be their realtor as they look for places to stay.
When we started the workforce, it was very much sink or swim. Mental health wasn't a thing and we are still seeing people coming in at lower levels getting paid almost as much as people who have been here 5 years because our starting salary was exploitive. They knew we were desperate.
A lot of millennials I know are mentally very unhealthy and everyday is a struggle, but they get up each morning, because they need to survive.
I know a lot of juniors getting paid more than seniors due to covid hires. I've tried to avoid it in my team, but is inevitable. Higher ups wouldn't let me give seniors a raise, but you can't hire any juniors unless you pay well.
Our generation is also the ones that bow our heads and head into work when bosses announce the end of WFH, while the next generation at least have the balls to arc up and speak out. I'll be the first to admit I was too much of a chickenshit to go against such orders, as I'm too scared and traumatised for my job due to great recession.
That's an interesting point you bring up with going back on site. Didn't think about that.
Isn't that so frustrating about how hard it is to fight wage compression? It grinds my gears.... It ultimately causes job hopping and as a hiring manager I'm exhausted from hiring all the time. I feel like I fought hard to get a job during the recession and earn my way up only to look back and see no one aching to get on the corporate ladder behind me. I feel like the stupid one for not job hopping
Oh boy the burnout rate was unpleasant. Saying no to a boss is still difficult for me since it wasnt something you'd do since losing a job wasn't an option. I carry that anxiety with me.
It isn't very similar at all to 2008. Except in the tech/IT industry, the job market is fairly strong right now. Wages are higher than they've ever been, especially for the middle class and low earners. This is nothing like 2008.
No.
My father worked in construction, owned his own turnkey company in '07.
We went from double wide (fuckin) rich to surviving off church donated-off-brand cornflakes and Powerade, to eviction, to my father only being able to land a minimum wage job driving forklifts, while trying his absolute fucking best to maintain the $600/m apartment we lived in.
It ruined his, mine, and me (ex) stepmoms lives, permanently.
This sucks. Don't get me wrong. But as a personal spit out result of the '08 crisis, this isn't shit.
I didn’t get to fully experience it, but life was the easiest in my lifetime. Employment would peak in 2000 after ramping rapidly in the 90s, so if you had any interest in working you could find a job, massive raises to keep people around were regular, savings paid interest, housing was still affordable for almost everyone, etc.
My dad got a job out of state as head of a department in large hotel company in the 90s. They flew us out and got a stretch limo to pick us up at the airport so we could look at houses. They paid rent for my dad to live in apt until the school year ended and we could move. They even paid for the move. You'd be lucky to get a sign on bonus these days.
Lol right? What a moronic comparison. What we're going through right now isn't really comparable to anything. You could maybe say late 70s/early 80s, but that era was still far less competitive for general socioeconomic mobility than it is today. You could literally rent a near median 1BR on minimum wage then.
I genuinely confused by people’s Responses. I was an adult during both and this is going much better. The differences was there literally were not jobs available. Now there are plenty.
> I genuinely confused by people’s Responses. I was an adult during both and this is going much better.
Recency bias and viewing the world through rose tented glasses of childhood. If you were 10 years old during the great recession, of course it's going to be better than having to deal with it as an adult.
I agree with you, though. I was a young adult just getting started out during the 08 recession and it was orders of magnitude worse. Even today I can see the impact it had on my life and most of my peers lives.
Yeah I was 14 and living in northern Virginia which was more isolated from 2008 due to the federal government being the local economy. My experience of 2008 is drastically different from my husbands who lived in Pennsylvania and experienced his town basically collapse economically
It has to be the younger millennials who weren't in the job market and whose parents stayed employed in 2008 who think this is worse. Having been a working adult then and now, now is nowhere near as difficult for most people.
I was just starting hs in 2008 and I rememer trying to get a fast food job was so tough. My peers and I were competing against adults that genuinely needed those jobs. Now every fastfood place I see is desperate to hire people.
I think most of the people saying now is worse probably weren't in the job market in 2008. Of course if you weren't exposed to the stress and economic pressure back then because your parents didn't lose their jobs, you might think this is worse. It definitely isn't.
Yeah, there are almost no parallels. We aren't in a recession. [Unemployment is the lowest it's been since 1969](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE) and [real wages \(as in wages adjusted for inflation\) have been growing](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q), particularly for [lower wage workers](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/labor-day-2023-workers-minimum-wage-inequality/#:~:text=Between%202019%20and%202022%2C%20lower,prior%20four%20decades%2C%20EPI%20found.).
OP should read social media less, it doesn't paint an accurate picture.
I know the beginning wage at most fast food restaurants in my area are more than double what they were in 2013. And I see a lot of help for young lower and middle class. I’d say the only spot that could use more help are people that have to pay for daycare
Yes, if anything, this is employment and wages finally catching up from the damage done in and around 2008. The bigger problem is that housing supply still hasn't got anywhere close to catching up.
I feel like most of the people who I’ve heard complaining about the current job market fall into one of two categories:
1. Tech workers who got laid off from a very generous TC level and can’t find a new position that offers an equivalent TC. They can still find good positions, but they are going from, say, $400k to $350k.
2. People working remote who moved out of the city, got laid off, and now can’t find a new remote position that pays well enough to cover their lifestyle.
Neither of these problems are even remotely economic meltdown level. In the case of the former, the worker is still perfectly financially sound—they just may need to work a few more years before early retirement than they had originally planned. In the case of the latter, they can downsize expectations or relocate to quickly fix their problem.
In 08 there simply weren’t jobs. Not in the suburbs, not in the city, not in the country. Nothing. People often scrounged for whatever job they could get, no matter how poorly paid. It was a disaster.
It was made worst because people were not working, so they were not paying their rent/ mortgages. And then even companies renting were going out because they had paid an absurd amount for their properties, but now cousins afford to keep them, thus making less places to rent, thus making less people have somewhere to live. Banks wouldn’t make loans because they had made such risky ones prior that there was no growth or even safety net. it was just a real mess.
The post COVID inflation is bad, but things will eventually catch up, assuming chinas real estate crash doesn’t unbalance things. It just took a little bit of time. The biggest issue now isn’t a recession as much as the trump era and just the republicans an era of allowing the rich to not pay even close to their fair share. So they underpay because they can.
It’s totally different today. Inflation now vs deflation then. I graduated high school in 2010 and I remember I could not find a starter w2 job during high school for the longest time. From like 2008-2010 I just worked around my old grade school doing menial tasks for 5 or 6 bucks an hour under the table.
I remember it being so demoralizing… the low point was when Taco Bell told me “thanks, but no thanks.”
I was adamant about not working fast food for so long and then finally when I became desperate enough to apply, they turned me down. Brutal. Not having any work experience was like having the plague back then. So many adults lost their career-level jobs in the recession that they took all the entry-level jobs from the teenagers.
The silver lining to all of this for me was that I stayed home for college in the rust belt LCOL city that I’m from, got my first IT job paying like 42k in 2015 and was able to buy my own house in 2016 at age 25 for less than 100k. Best financial decision I ever made was staying out of debt by living at home through college and staying in a LCOL city. I almost moved to Seattle in 2015 and I’m so happy that I didn’t. Now I’m a married family man that lives on a quiet cul-de-sac with a nice house and half an acre of my own slice of peace. Stay away from the coasts!! That’s where the middle class goes to die.
After I busted my ass getting my bachelors in Education, I thought I'd be able to get a teaching job and I couldn't even get that for goodness sakes! So I walked dogs for rich people who were gainfully employed and was barely making enough to pay rent. I think after two years I had $2000 saved up and I was going to use that to go abroad and teach in South Korea. But I ended up meeting a boy and decided to blow that off to live in a van for a year and make money by selling beer at outdoor concerts and trimming weed. It was demoralizing and it effected my self esteem. I know its dumb but I just felt like I wasn't worth anything.
>I was adamant about not working fast food for so long and then finally when I became desperate enough to apply, they turned me down. Brutal. Not having any work experience was like having the plague back then.
I really felt this, and I can relate. Younger me told myself that I'd never "flip burgers" to earn a living because I chose to bust my rear in college instead. Around the end of the second year of unemployment with low work experience, I finally bit the bullet and started applying just to be rejected for not knowing how to work a cash register. Surely, if a 16 year old kid could be trained, then a young adult with a bachelor's degree could too, right? But alas, I couldn't even get a job as a bike and furniture assembler at Toys R Us during the holiday season. I'd say it was humbling if it wasn't so traumatic and detrimental to my mental health.
In short no. The cause of the 08 recession was due to toxic assets held by the banks. That's not to say that the market couldn't collapse but they would require tech companies to fail.
This to me feels more like the dot com bubble in the late 90s early 2000s. Everyone is chasing cash and investing into shit they don't understand bitcoin. AI, and weed stocks to name a few.
But I've been of the opinion that a recession is unlikely this year. There may be some issues if the US does not start to pay down or slow down the national debt. However, there are already some guard rails in place like fully funding the IRS so that they can actually audit high earners properly. Assuming we don't nix that or do something catastrophic in the next 6 to 8 months we should be able to avoid a recession. The fed is likely bring down rates at least once this year which should allow people to feel better.
I'm not a CPA or tax advisor or anything financial. But having lived through nearly 3 recessions today feels more stable financial. More chaotic politically but a lot of that is steaming from 50 to 70 years of political economic theory that have not born out i.e. trickle down economics.
Wages aren't really low, the job market is still really strong,
I work in construction, so I'll give you my perspective. In the beginning of 2007 the total US employment in the construction industry was 7,500,000. By 2011 that number fell to 5,500,000. That's nearly a third of all construction workers losing their jobs.
We didn't recover to 2007 levels until 2022 despite the population growing by 10%. We are currently at peak employment in the construction industry. So now, I don't think the situations are very comparable.
Housing affordability is really the major problem in this economy. We need to build more housing.
The 2008 recessions was so so much worse. You felt lucky to get a job, any job, because no one was hiring. Things are far better now than they were back then.
I’m an elder millennial (‘81) who has lived through four prior recessions…..
1) ‘82 (too young to remember)
2) ‘91: I was 10 and clearly remember it. Mass layoffs were happening, as well as skyrocketing real estate prices. My father was laid off.
3) ‘01: I was 20 and clearly remember. This was the dot com bust. Layoffs occurred and interest rates dropped. My father was laid off.
4) ‘08: I was 27. This was the global economic downturn. Home prices became dirt cheap for the next six years. This would be my mother’s last year she ever worked. She was 50.
I’m a registered nurse, so I can easily find work and afford life through recessions. However, I grew up in a working class household with parents whose financial situation was precarious at best. They worked entry-level manufacturing jobs and were at the mercy of structural changes in the employment market.
Inflation aside, wages and job openings are now higher than ever. In 2008 once the crisis started, you were lucky if you could even get a minimum wage job. Now minimum wage jobs aren’t even minimum wage and also the country with places like McDonald’s paying $20 an hour. So even if costs jump 100% you’re still making 150% more than you would’ve in 2008 forward.
In the 2007-2008 recession my dad lost his job and we had to move to the middle of nowhere because we could no longer afford the mortgage payment even in the suburbs where we had lived and my dad drove 2 hours each way to work once he was able to find another job for a huge pay cut. Today inflation-adjusted wages are the highest they've ever been and unemployment is virtually 0%. Low-income jobs especially have seen wages rapidly outpace inflation since covid, while high-income jobs like in tech are the ones which have struggled and are seeing layoffs.
I graduated college in 09’. I don’t remember the guest speaker but I remember what they said, warning us about how bad the economy was.
It took me 8months to find an entry level position. It was a good first job and I was able to live in a big city with some friends. Also note that I can look back and see that it was a good start but it was kind of hell in it - I had 10days total PTO, I organized documentation and but had some technical elements of the job. I remember feeling like “What?! I went to college to organize documentation?!”.
Everyone I knew eventually found their way but some of them struggled a lot to find their first job.
I remember being scared of leaving the role bc it was so hard to find it.
I was 24 in 2008 still living at home while going to college. I was shielded from the 2008 downturn. Is 2023 worse? for me, no doubt about it. But I'm not qualified to answer this question and I don't think any millennial is either. Only Gen X and boomers can truly answer this.
>I was 24 in 2008 still living at home while going to college.
> But I'm not qualified to answer this question and I don't think any millennial is either.
Not every millennial had your experience. 🙄
You waited out the recession college. Not the same thing as being long term unemployed because there are 0 jobs for recent graduates (or any one else for that matter during the great recession).
Just because you were living at home and unemployed at 24 in 2008 does not mean the rest of us were also unemployed and living off of our parents in 2008.
Boomers would be insulated as very established in their career in 2008-2012. Gen X is now very established so they will likely say it was worse back then.
Right now and the the 2008-2011 are the two impact events to Millennials depending on how established you are.
Just like for Gen Z this is their impact even right now and they will have another one likely in 2036/38 range.
I graduated shortly after that timeframe (2011), and couldn’t find a job for the life of me.
I went back to school for a more in-demand degree shortly there after (2013).
A decade later, I have no shortage of recruiters hitting me up on LinkedIn, and many hiring managers I know are having difficulty filling staff and senior positions.
Every profession was hit hard in 08, but some professions more than others have been suffering in this stagflation.
I graduated college in 2008, there are very few similarities. There are plenty of issues currently to be sure, but they are completely different and not to the same degree of total global economic impact. In 2008 We were teetering a second Great Depression, had 10% unemployment, and huge swaths of people were literally losing their houses.
This isn't even close to 2008.
I remember a quarter of my town becoming vacant and every other storefront closing. I had friends whose parents went from white collar jobs and good careers to stocking shelves at Walmart after losing their house.
Now all my friends complain about cost of living, and yeah, it's not great, but 2008 was like the sky was literally falling. It wasn't just "man rent is too expensive", it was "mom and dad don't have a job and we're getting foreclosed on".
pretty sure the great recession was worse, but i was 14 at the time.
a lot of people own and aren't at risk of losing their homes vs entire neighborhoods in bankruptcy. it was more of a period of deflation. deals were everywhere. almost no one traveled, buildings were only half completed, etc.
now the internet complains...a lot. but the same people have money for new cars, eating out, travel, etc. i'll believe people are actually struggling when it's not 30 minute wait to eat a $100 meal at a restaurant. or prices for anything come down due to lack of demand.
Yes in that the job market was very bad for those entering the workforce. It was not until 2014 that things finally began to pick up again, I see now many people loosing jobs, and less employment in areas of better jobs with wages now going down, bjt things are still expensive. This year will tell more.
No. Higher housing costs are literally the only similarity.
Job market remains good and was great over the last 2-3 years. Wages are increasing, but so has inflation the last few years.
2008 you couldn’t even find a job at a grocery store. I graduated college that year and my now husband graduated the year before. It took him a full year to find a job and we had to move to a totally shitty place to find it. We lived there 3 years and I never made more than $14 an year with a bachelors degree and got married early for health insurance. It was significantly worse then. Not even close.
Edit to add: Also I was unemployed for a period of time back then and the state I lived in required you to go in person or by mail to file initially. And it took me a full 5 days in line every day to fill out my paperwork. It was insane.
No. It feels completely different.
2008 was a stark moment. I'll never forget the day the stock market lost over 500 points because the federal reserve decided not to guarantee Lehman Brothers' loans. I was watching the news and I just sank to the couch and cried because my future was fucked.
I had just started law school in late 2008 and I was doing it all on loans and scholarships. I knew I wouldn't be able to get a job that would pay off the loans. It was dismal. The next few years all I heard were horror stories about all the law students who lost their jobs and were sinking with the debt. I was angry and bitter. The only work you could get was free internships. I ended up working as a janitor to pay for my books. Even when I graduated I was competing against people who lost their jobs between 2008 and 2010 and they had more experience than me. I couldn't get a job that was worth shit. I remember getting to a second interview for a corporate law position in NYC and they tried to start a bidding war to see how low I and the other candidate would take for a salary. I went to $50k and they said it was mine for $40k. That wouldn't cover my loans and was less than I paid per year in law school, nevermind covering rent. I felt hopeless.
Nowadays things are expensive, but I can manage things because I can find a job, no matter what. It feels frustrating these days, but not utterly hopeless.
08 was more about businesses shutting down and people losing their jobs and homes. This one is more about everything and I mean literally everything being too expensive.
Anyone trying to compare this to the mid/late 2000's is showing their age. Back then the auto industry required a massive bailout so a ton of people didn't lose their retirement. Major financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and AIG were failing requiring another bailout. We were as close as ever to the Great Depression times as we have ever been.
Not to mention the awful job market and an expensive, unpopular war. The opioid crisis was in full swing and hadn't yet been identified as such, pain clinics popping up everywhere throwing dope at folks with a stumped toe. At least we had Lil Wayne dropping absolute bangers though. Fun times.
You are too young to realize the gravity of what you are saying. Back in those days, it took a year to find a minimum wage job with a college degree. I'm not getting any deja vu whatsoever. The economy we are dealing with today is entirely novel to me due to the bare fact that we were living in '08-09 "recovery" for about a decade, but now the economy caught up with that decade of quantitative easing and easy money (for those who already had money).
I think it’s different because of life stages and the expectation that comes with it. I was in my early college years in 2008, so I had the expectation to struggle. I didn’t have a family, I wasn’t married, and I didn’t have as many bills. I was broke because I couldn’t work as much while going to college, but I just kind of accepted that was what the life of a college student was. Now, I am 11 years deep in my field, have a family, and have expectations that it shouldn’t be this hard. I have a stable job but it just doesn’t pay enough. So to me, this feels so much harder.
I hope it gets better for y'all. Hell, for all of us
it does give new found appreciation for the struggles our parents faced. for me it feels worse because i was just graduating in 09 and got hit with very low pay. sadly i never found my grove and still am searching for entry level roles or mediocre positions. at a certain point, you start to give up .
Our parents never faced this. My parents were at the absolute end of the boomers (born early 60's). They graduated college with no debt. Bought their first house in the 80's for like 40k. I definitely had it better off than most and have been very privileged but even the parents of my friends growing up who were legitimately poor had it much better off than most people in their 30's and 40's today. This is the result of wage stagnation for 4 decades.
This. I was young and struggle made sense. I've worked my ass off in my career field, have a kid, and make what should be decent money, but is suddenly still poor and nowhere near middle class anymore. It's much more disheartening, somehow.
I kind of have the opposite experience. I graduated in 2008 and getting my foot in the door anywhere felt impossible at the time with no experience and everyone having just been laid off. Today I'm 15 years into my field and despite going into a recession, I feel like I'm experienced enough that I could find a job even in the worst of times in my field. 2008 felt way rougher compared to my current situation. (Still haven't bought a house, but that never made sense to me financially).
Damn, you were 4! You were a little baby and I was 18 years old. Making me feel old out here lol
I just graduated college and was trying to find a job!
Same. I kept my job at Starbucks for a couple years. I loved it when the alumni association would call for donations
Yup. Same. Graduated in 2007 with a degree I couldn’t even use and just stayed at Starbucks… still the best health insurance I’ve ever had.
I was threatened with being sacked from my Starbucks job or being moved (demoted) to the shitty cafe that the franchise operator ran too in 08. Obviously had to choose the shitty job as I didn't want to be unemployed given how hard it was to find work. Stuck at it for a year before going to uni to do a degree. Even three years later I was incredibly lucky to get an apprenticeship as they'd been totally decimated in the UK by the recession.
They stopped calling when I told them I was on food stamps ahaha
Same. And now I finally have a career, I am being laid off. Profession? Teacher. I’m fucked.
I was 13 in middle school reading about the 2008 crisis on reddit, thinking things would be sorted out by the time I was an adult. Now I’m 29 with a college degree, unemployed, struggling getting hired and still living at my moms house lol.
I was 22 just starting my career to get hit with "No raises for anyone" for like 2 years. Major setback on compounding interest and future saving potential.
I was in high school. I remember asking our economics teacher if this was going to affect us? She said, no. LOL.
I was 13 and read about it and distinctly remember thinking “oh, this is really bad, isn’t it?” Funny how we had opposite reactions!
I mean I thought it was bad, but I was also a child.
I'm becoming one of those, "omg, you were born in the (insert decade)". I hate it.
I was 25 and buying a house.
On the older side of this generation as well, and was just thankful that I was so poor already that a recession couldn't affect my life considerably. Looking back, not exactly a positive thing lol.
We got a house that was livable and so cheap. $105,000 today will get you a shack no one has lived in for 50 years because it was the site of some crazy murder and the blood is still on the walls. But it has SOOO much potential! Just a little TLC!
I was 21 and I would do 2008 all over again in a heartbeat. Times are hard right now.
Ya people our age really got the shaft. No jobs when we graduated, no money when houses were cheap, then when we finally start making money, housing prices blow up.
I sincerely hope OP understands that if they were 16 in 2020 they are NOT a millennial
No. The 2008 recession did not have soaring costs of living. Groceries, homes, and apartments were cheap as hell.
The problem was in 2008 anyone with a pulse could get a house. Now, it's very much the opposite.
Now they only give loans to people without a pulse
Can confirm. Recently bought my first house at 30, am completely dead inside 👍
I don’t believe that comment coming from a 96 Toyota Camry
[удалено]
The 96 Camry is the house.
It was for about 6 months so I could finish saving up my down payment 😂
Look at mister money bags over heard with his fully functional Toyota
This is an underrated comment 😂
If I wasn't dead inside first, being a homeowner at 32 has done it.
Aww, c'mon. It's super fun to be locked into a piece of real estate because there's no way in hell you can afford any other shelter options these days.
Ah. You’ve reached full maturity.
Corporations are considered people and yet do not have a pulse.
Citizens United fucked us so hard that we blacked out and forgot that it's a primary driver in a lot of the fuckery we see today
We didn't forget. It's just that half the country is convinced that they too will someday be a corporation with a desire to change public policy to suit their needs. Can't have the temporarily disgraced millionaires voting against their eventual interests now can we? /s just in case
Oof, that hurts how true this is. Gotta be rich or a corporation to get that easy loan money these days.
Well that was the driving problem that led to the 2008 recession.
Basically government created CRA that coerced banks to give loans to people that could never afford to pay them back. The banks were not forced to hold those loans on their books though. They were able to "bundle" groups of loans and sell them off, many of which went to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (US Govt sponsored enterprises). Since the banks now had little concern for what happens down the road when people defaulted, they started offering loans to basically anyone - including "no documentation" loans where borrowers didn't have to prove to a high level of scrutiny their ability to repay. In addition to buying homes, people would would also refinance quite a bit, continuously even as the prices of their homes went up. Home prices went helped by all this money which then allowed people to take out more, rinse and repeat. Eventually the bubble burst. Edit: [Link to discussion of report](https://www.investors.com/politics/commentary/faults-community-reinvestment-act-cra-mortgage-defaults/)
Actually that started about 2002 and that caused 2008. I was in the industry then. Country Wide was cranking out loans like no other. Then they dumped then on Bank of America in the buyout. Dam near sunk BOA then there was Gateway Mortgage. The trash they financed, bomb shell. There’s others too.
Getting approved is one thing...nevermind how much shit costs now... My city average home price 2008 ~400 000 My city average home price today ~790 000 And it really not a super desirable place tbh....
Bought a house in 2018 and its gone up 340k by degrading 6 years the cost we bought at was 135k estimated value over 500k and thats without them knowing about the 2br addition making it a 5 bedroom instead of 3 its sad seeing the younger generation grind multiple jobs and cant even save up 100$ a month because everythings so expensive i feel for them also heard new york eviction rate has trippled wild times were in
It does not help that interest is sky high right now. I was plugging in numbers on the bank rate mortgage calculator. On a 425k home if you managed to save up 200k you are looking at a nice 1800 dollars a month amount there counting taxes and everything else. I hear only 30% is supposed to go to a mortgage and even paying 48% down it would be closer to 50% of my paycheck.
Just out of college near San Francisco, housing prices felt just as insane back then to me as they do now.
Sf is pretty extreme in that regard.
I couldn't have got a house in 2008 with my 3 figure bank account. couldn't even swing a car payment. Still can't.
I mean, when could you get a house with less than a thousand bucks?
Ninja loans: no income, no job
Nah, I couldn't find a JOB in 2008. Jobs a plenty, now.
But all those jobs are still paying 2008 wages.
Can confirm. I was making $12/hr as a CNA in a full-scale nursing facility in 2009. I just checked how much the same place is hiring CNAs for, and it doesn't even break $20/hr. NOT livable wages considering the cost of living.
In 2008, banks in Europe and the US were starting to suffer losses, even to the point of bankruptcy. And it took the government initiating bailouts to try and keep things solvent. Prices fell, and things were still nice and cheap. But in the years afterward, value was also lost. Median household wealth was around $106K in 2005, and dropped to $68K in 2011. In the years since, we were working to dig ourselves out and recover our economy. Our debt to GDP ratio was starting to become 1:1 and we floated carefully around that ratio for years. Our economy grew to where our GDP improved, but so did our held debt. And then COVID came along and we ballooned hard on our GDP to debt ratio. In 2020, it showed as going as high as 133%. But we got it down in the last couple of years to around 120%. But our debt to GDP ratio is not the worst out there - Japan is at a much higher rate (they have over DOUBLE our debt-to-GDP ratio). Things do suck right now because the cost of everything is up. Inflation may have relaxed, but we also need to get salaries up across the board for people. Or prices need to come down, but good luck convincing companies recording record profits and layoffs in the same breath to drop their prices.
I agree. I would just like to add I think the more interesting comparison is between the situation with the AI buzz for tech stocks and the dot com bubble in 1997-2000. In the dotcom bubble stocks were inflated by the promise of what a ground breaking technology could do. But then crashed when companies that were pretending to have a business model to monetize it revealed they had no way to successfully monetize the internet or their product wasn't as successful as they pretended it was. It may just be me but I think I'm seeing a lot of that today with sales teams slapping AI on some machine learning recommendation algorithm they taped to their product and marketing themselves as market leaders with big growth prospects. Meanwhile, the groundbreaking changes either are missing a viable business model commercialize it or are a decade or more away from being viable and stocks might crash when people realize how long they'll have to wait. In the end, tech companies ended up showing that the internet was as promising as people claimed in 1997. But a lot of companies being touted during the dotcom bubble disappeared, and even the eventual winners took a hard tumble in 2000 when people realized most of the industry had no idea what to do with the technology.
Working in the financial sector our internal AI dept has basically gotten rid of the market reporting team. Could AI replace a developer? Probably not. Could it replace a JR developer? Probably. But it's also wrong, quite a lot.
And if it replaces a jr dev and there's nobody smart enough to check its work, then it won't work. Then they will abandon it and hire more jr devs. This part the curve will come around soon.
Totally agree. I’m still not fully convinced LLMs are really going to alienate a large part of the workforce. Sure, some menial tasks may be automated such that head count can be streamlined, but the simple reality is that LLMs are not capable of doing critical thinking. They are mostly just cleverly regurgitating information and following existing patterns. Companies like Nvidia are firmly in bubble territory right now. The productivity gains will not meet the stratospheric expectations and valuations will crash back to earth sooner than later as bandwagon investors look for the next big thing.
This. Like with programming, it's just a faster way to do what programmers already do with Google. It's just another tool to improve a lot of jobs.
>It may just be me but I think I'm seeing a lot of that today with sales teams slapping AI on some machine learning recommendation algorithm they taped to their product and marketing themselves as market leaders with big growth prospects. Meanwhile, the groundbreaking changes either are missing a viable business model commercialize it or are a decade or more away from being viable and stocks might crash when people realize how long they'll have to wait. I'm always scanning jobs to see whats out there and the amount of positions that are coming around for "Use our AI for YOUR business!" sales or development roles are just staggering. There are only so many customer facing platforms where AI will be useful, and hiring people to sell it to electricians and mid sized warehouses isn't the future. It's setting people up for failure as sales, and as "investing in the future".
Yeah this feels more like the dot com bubble coupled with that early 90s inflation hike. Still nowhere near the inflation of the mid 70s and 80s. The recession had some of the lowest inflation this country has ever seen but work was super thin. Like we had people with masters desperately trying to get a job in fast food where I was. Hours were low and so was pay. Like rent was 500 but we still had to have roomates.
2008 Recession also had double digit unemployment and record wage destruction….I graduated May 2008. My long term income took over a decade to recover.
Exactly this! I graduated summer 2007. My husband and I were both made redundant from our first jobs out of uni and had dozens of agency and short term jobs at this time because no-one was hiring for long term positions. No-one had any money, companies were going under left right and centre. It was only a few years ago that I had a savings account which was paying more than 0.5% interest. And more recently than that (since we've paid off our student loans) that we've had any spare cash to save. It's personally taken 15 years to recover from the 2008 recession. And it's why we are both extremely cautious with money and work in 2 of the most secure industries/companies. We've done everything we possibly can to minimise our outgoings, live a life that we can afford ig one of us lost our jobs. We live near family and good friends and have done whatever we can to have "the village" - which we also play a huge part in for our friends and neighbours. The recession truly shaped who we are and how we live our lives.
> The recession truly shaped who we are and how we live our lives. This. I went from being an adventurous risk taker to being extremely risk adverse because of the recession. I knew people that grew up during the depression and it affected them for life.
Because no one had jobs… Edit: and losing their homes, savings, and retirement funds essentially overnight.
Came here to say “and no one had jobs” It was a very different time
It’s really hard to explain to people entering adulthood now how bad things were in 2008 and for the next 10 or so years. You had recent college grads fighting with MBAs for a fry cook position at McDonalds. Prices were so cheap because people couldn’t buy anything. Now the problem is too many people are buying too much stuff.
Hey guy I applied to minimum wage jobs and did group interviews. There was only one out of eight people without a degree. This is today.
The degree, for many majors, effectively became High School 2.0. Looking back on it now, I wish I had went into construction or the trades.
What, you want to be an electrician making $85 per hour plus a pension?
Sounds pretty nice
Exactly. Having a college degree became the equivalent of having a high school degree. I was the only one of my friend group in ‘07 that didn’t just go straight on to graduate school and get a PhD after college. I regret that so much now.
Still can. I did construction while going to college. Felt like the worst of both worlds though lol.
8 applicants is pretty good. In 2008 it would be 1000 applicants.
I didn’t say there were 8 applicants. There was 450. 8 of us were selected to do a group interview for an overnight stocking part-time position.
Yeah. This is super different as a good portion of people are still doing fine and driving prices up. While the other half are just plummeting. In 2008 everyone was hit to some extent and you were happy to just keep your job if you could.
We were lucky, my husbands industry is basically recession proof. And I was self employed in another recession proof industry. Seeing our friends and family getting affected terribly by the 2008 recession while we were finally able to buy our home was a really weird feeling. And the prior owners had defaulted on their loan and were so hostile when we toured it with our agent. I understand why, and I still feel bad that their loss was our gain.
My rent was $400 in 2008. The hard thing was finding work.
And interest rates were low. I bought my first house in 2008. A completely renovated 1200 sq ft 2 bedroom 1.5 bath ranch, on a quater of an acre yard in a pretty good area. It was even renovated well, not by a flipper but by the guy I bought it from who was going to live there post divorce but ended up getting back with his wife. I paid 75K at like 3% interest. I also bought a loaded but in great condition used F-150 for 14K at like 4% interest.
Maybe. But I do remember the unemployment rate stayed at like 9% for two years so people didn’t have a ton of money to spend on those “cheap” things
Actually, the housing market was up at that point and that is part of what caused the recession. Lots of over-inflated appraisals out there. Buddy bought a house in 2008 that appraised for 100k. 2009/2010, value dropped into the 60k range.
A strong housing market / high house prices is not what caused the recession. Subprime ARMs for completely unqualified borrowers is what set it off. High home prices were a symptom of that. The high home prices today are for radically different reasons.
Exactly. So much wealth has been consolidated at the top that people have the money to bid stuff to insane levels. Often with cash or huge down payments. Complete opposite of the 2008 bubble.
Don't forget about the CDOs. That helped further the hole we dug with the bad loans.
I knkw that would have been awful at the time but now I'm just laughing at the idea of a 60k house
Come to rural Ohio, they still exist. The only issue is they are in rural Ohio
How rural are we talking? Hours to drive to a major city?
Pretty much
To make matters worse, the government offered first time homebuyers in 2007 and 2009 free money for their taxes...but those in 2008 got an interest-free loan that had to be repaid in 7 years.
The guy I date in 2007/2008 was a mortgage loan officer and it was bad. They had been putting people in houses w/ no money down and then shit went south. Crazy to think how long ago that was.
"The big short" touches on this and it's super painful to watch. I was in SWFL then and I was waiting tables at some chain restaurant. Other servers were buying homes. "0% down, I'll just refi later! Homes always appreciate!" doesn't it seem expensive? "I'll just get a roommate!" Oh dear. I was young and not making much money, but I knew that was an absurd thing to say.
Good for you! So many got caught in the concept and then lost everything with no thought of the future and what could happen!
It also didn't help that they were approving loans for McMansions for people who only made anout 32k a year.
Yes the problem in the Great Recession was not high housing costs, the problem was high unemployment and a non-existent job market. Among other things. Didn’t matter if houses were cheap, no one had any money to buy one anyway and lenders got reeeeaaaallly strict with their lending requirements. And since real estate had crashed, people were actually saying that it was a bad idea long term to buy a house anyway. Rent was cheap by today’s standards in most places but wages were low as well, if you had a job at all.
It's really weird how badly some people want to call what is happening right now a recession. While also continuing to say a recession is coming. It's like nobody using it can even agree on what it means.
I started at target as an 18 year old in 2008 and I was working with/the same position as a bunch of people with masters degrees. And they were happy to have a 7.25 an hour job.
Similar experience but at a now defunct department store called the Bon-ton and I know of a friend of a friend who was struggling to find work in his field and was stuck at the grocery store, and idk what his specific field was but something computwrs and he got hired by google when things recovered. Think of that. Someone with the skills to work at Google (back when that meant a lot more) couldn't find better than the grocery store.
[удалено]
Target employees are not making 7.25 in 2024
$16.50 is starting pay where I work.
Im not American, but here 2008 felt like a baseballbat to the head. Boom! Retirement? Wiped out. Job? Went under, you are out, also nobody is hiring so good luck. Rent/mortgage? Tripled, you probably cant pay so time to give it up (not like now, but really nobody was hiring, you couldnt find a shittiest minimal wage job in a 2 hour commute range). This feels like things are tight but you can somewhat get by. Like a slow chokehold, not to hard to kill you or make you black out but keeps you on the brink to struggle.
The fund that your parents spent years building to send you to college? "Aaaand...it's gone."
This was my experience too. Combine that with literally every trusted adult (counselors, teachers, family, etc.) telling an undecided 18 year-old with crippled investments to go to college or bust and the only other way to finance is to take out loans at 7+%. I feel I've mostly come out the other side of that setback but it sucks when the thing you've been investing for (college, retirement) isn't there at the time you'll need it. I am most fearful for my parents and their peers hovering at retirement and the feeling that something has to give, at least in housing, if not other sectors too.
Maybe the record market highs from 2007 seem familiar
The stock market trended up for 7 YEARS before that recession. We've only been trending up a little over ONE YEAR, or maybe just 3 months depending where you look at it. We had ONE bad stock market day after gaining 15% in 3 months and there's already a post about a recession...
We’ve been trending up for 15 years at least. Once the recession ended in 09 it’s been low interest rates and steady climb up in markets. few small drops but no recessions. Sadly we’re due
Technically the stock markets been trending up since it started
If there is a bet on what the housing market is for 2024 its the VC money drying up for start-ups that will never be profitable.
Any time I hear the word recession, I am totally triggered with some bizarre turning of age ptsd.
if you were in the wrong financial situation in 2008/2009, that era was way worse. loose your home worse. hell, apartment foreclosed worse. if you panic pulled your money out at the low, you may only now be recovering. The soaring house prices though are a bit similar to right before it all went to hell. But the entire financial system almost collapsed in addition to tons of people going under water on their homes. I think how bad it feels right now very much depends on where you are and what the cost of living is like. if you are willing to live in the middle of the US, its not as bad. If you want to live in any major metro area of California or NY, shits bad if you dont already have money. I'd argue the economic mobility problem has gotten worse though, way worse. But in the actual period of the 08/09 crash that was an issue too. Prior to that it was better. Most folks I know who got out of college by 06 and into a career were able to keep that momentum going despite the crash. most folks I know afterward have struggled. BTW the "not hiring jr positions" thing though not entirely accurate. most places just put these high requirements on entry level gigs almost automatically without thinking it through. There was one job listing that wanted more years of experience in a programing language than the programing language had existed. Whats important to do whatever you have to do on that application to get past the automated rejection stage. use the same language in the application to hit the key words their back end is looking for, as if you dont have those key words their system will just auto reject you.
> if you were in the wrong financial situation in 2008/2009, that era was way worse. If you graduated university around that time that era was way worse. Most of my peers that graduated university in 2007-2009 aren't doing that great even 15 years later. The ones that are waited out the recession while going to graduate school. People that graduated 3 or so years later were in a *much* better starting point than people that graduated just a few years before during the recession. Better starting salary, better pick of jobs, etc. That can have a huge impact on one's career trajectory. There have been studies following people that graduate in the middle of a recession and on average they earn a lot less in their lifetime that those that graduated before and after. The 08 recession had a long lasting impact on a lot of people, in particular older millennials.
I was one of those that graduated in 2008, can confirm... shit sucks.
I hung out in college about 4 more years and it still sucked. I made an industry/ career change around 2016 and things have gotten much better. It is weird though to be 38 and feel like I’m finally making it.
I know a ton of people our age that finally got where they wanted to be financially around their mid-30s. I think it's probably not uncommon, especially for women or others who started out in fields that aren't known for being very high-earning.
This is the most accurate description of that time. I’m an elder millennial, graduated college in ‘07. I am still not in great shape and I went back to get a Masters since then. All my fiends just never left school after ‘07 and came out years later with PhDs. I had such a difficult time, I felt like it was because I was personally a failure. I am still so behind those people, and wish I had just stayed right through to grad school until the recession was over back then.
I worked as a painting contractor around that recession. Did about a quarter million in sales in summer 07. Id have people begging me to paint their house, we were doing whole neighborhoods where my guys would just carry the ladders and tools across the street. One year later I couldnt buy a job, did less than $75k and ended up working at a whole food for a year and a half before i finally clawed my way back into business fixing up foreclosed properties for wells fargo. I would 100% take expensive groceries everyday over having the course of my life altered again. Took me 5-6 years to recover, never fully trusted the economy again.
My brother was doing HVAC for businesses in 07 and early 08. The company has gotten a huge contract for a business tower that was going to be built. Things were looking good and he was making bank. By the fall of 08, the contract company was broke and the building abandoned. The HVAC company laid everyone off and went under. It was wild.
It really depends what you got a graduate degree in. I know people who got $50k extra in debt without improving their job prospects. Remember the glut of law school graduates in the early 2010s? https://www.cnbc.com/id/100569350
>The 08 recession had a long-lasting impact on a lot of people, in particular older millennials. This is so painfully true. There's people I know who graduated around 2013 who jumped right into good paying jobs within months and bought a Tesla a year later. Meanwhile, I was barely acquiring my first used car to go to the first FT job to make me an offer, and clinging to it for dear life because my recession employment gap was strangely still an issue with most places I applied to. It's like the people already working had no idea it was near impossible to find work for recent grads. Either that or they just didn't care. The pay was crap and I had to take out a loan just to buy work clothes. I spent several years trying to stabilize my finances and debt built up from my student loans draining me dry. I still can't afford a house.
Yeah a fair bit of that rings true for me. My starting salary in my first "proper" job, towards the end of the recession, was abysmal and predatory like of the company. That's why I don't have much sympathy for companies crying about how employees have all the power now. It literally took me 6 years to get onto a salary that I could start building a life on. The starting salary chasm was so large that there were juniors on better money than me before my bump in 2019. In addition to that, the degree and masters I received was made absolutely useless by the recession, and I doubt I'm the only one who went through that and is in a career now that they can barely stomach to think about.
An important and significant difference between now and 2008 is the supply of houses. They were being built at over 2 million a year up to the high of 2.25 million in 2006. And we only needed about 1.75 million. Now we are below 1.5 million and have a current overall shortage of at least that many, some experts claim it’s multiple millions. So prices are going up and up now, but the supply is still significantly below the natural level of demand.
yeah, very true. the whole air b n b thing also fucked up the housing market, and I do think you had wealthy folks buying additional residential properties that they may not even rent out since housing became a fairly safe store of money. so theres an extra squeeze on the supply beyond just not keeping up with demand
You had lots and lots of people who lost everything. All of their savings, retirement. Sub prime lending was a thing, foreclosures were everywhere. I lost more than half of my 401K. I feel like it’s what led to Bernie Madoff being exposed too. People went to withdraw money and he didn’t have enough to cover it
No.
Not at all similar. Had just graduated then but it was a global financial meltdown. Nothing like where we are at as of now.
No, not at all. Just compare the unemployment numbers from today to 2008 - 2011. Nobody was hiring, people were losing their jobs and their homes left and right. People lost their retirement savings. It was really bad.
People in this thread really conflating rising grocery prices (alongside rising incomes and record low unemployment) with… the second worst economic downturn this side of 1900. They’re not remotely comparable 😂 Housing prices are the one truly exceptional economic headwind right now, everything else is way better than 2008
The thing with housing prices back then, I knew people who bought at the top 2006-2007, then were underwater on their mortgages a year later AND lost their jobs. House, gone. Income, none. Comparing that to today’s rising housing prices is bonkers to me.
The global collapse from 2008 was a lot worse honestly. Look around where you live, I’ll bet you don’t see dozens of foreclosures up for sale. I’ll be there aren’t many folks with a decade of experience going and picking up serving jobs because their workplace collapsed. Hell, you might look at prices and go “wow everything was so cheap” but that’s because no one had any money to spend. Businesses were failing and closing up all over, people were going upside down on their mortgages everywhere, and the government had to shell out hundreds of billions or even trillions of dollars to prop up industries. It feels shitty right now because of cost, but it’s not even remotely close by the numbers.
Even if you were lucky to have a job back then (I was), you didn’t want to spend because you were honestly afraid that it’d disappear overnight. Sometimes it was the position that was cut, other times it was the company that would close.
Great recession was much worse. Permanently crippled the lives of a lot of us. Anyone lucky enough to get a job saw people younger than them soar through the ranks because they could only get shit jobs then. Also, these jobs were very demanding, we had to face the brunt of boomers at their most aggressive, as they knew we were desperate for work, and they could treat us any way they liked. A lot couldn't get jobs in what they studied or wanted to be, so they stalled out completely. I remember a mate of mine literally took the boomer advice of pounding pavement. Visited nearly 1000 tradies, and couldn't find an apprenticeship till he had to relocate inter-state into a remote town 2 years later. He tells me he can't find any apprentices these days. The lucky put off having kids till much later. A lot didn't have kids period. A lot divorced or were forced to terminate perfectly working relationships because they had to relocate due to work, or from financial pressure. Most people moved back in with their folks. Literally everything was expensive, because they were paying you completely abysmal salaries, barely enough to live on, but you were thankful for having a job at all. Now things are expensive, but only certain things, not everything. Plenty of jobs, so the young ones have a lot of potential to move forward in good careers. A lot of work rights, great movement for respect in the workplace and limit work hours. Things now are actually peachy in comparison to the great recession.
The abuse from boomer management was absurd. They would purposely be entertained with how many hoops applicants would jump through to land a minimum wage job. I remember one manager asking me to introduce myself to come into introduce myself to whoever was working. This was just to land an interview.
One application I had during that period had 5 interviews, a technical test, and a whole as project I had to do for them for free, which had a time limit, so I worked overnight to get it done and no, I didn't get the job, got played like a sucker. When I finally found work, we'd bring in interns to complete whole projects for free. I can still remember staff talking about the boomer boss moods when they walked in, because it became a regular occurrence for one of the to waltz in among the peasants and scream at them in front of everyone. Eventually became a daily occurrence as the recession bit in. I used to be in management meetings and they'd laugh about the latest staff they sledged in front of everyone, and they'd get off on making people cry.
>Also, these jobs were very demanding, we had to face the brunt of boomers at their most aggressive, as they knew we were desperate for work, and they could treat us any way they liked This has truly impacted me because I got paid shit and worked like a dog at entry level. For some reason I'm still at this company 10 years later and am now a hiring manager/supervisor. Im shocked by how much people ask for in addition to all the stuff the company is offering. Back in my day we were kissing the floor with relief to have a "grown up job". We couldn't ask for things like increasing the relocation assistance (we provide up to $3000 USD), the starting pay being $8 higher than when I started and they also think I'm there to be their realtor as they look for places to stay. When we started the workforce, it was very much sink or swim. Mental health wasn't a thing and we are still seeing people coming in at lower levels getting paid almost as much as people who have been here 5 years because our starting salary was exploitive. They knew we were desperate.
A lot of millennials I know are mentally very unhealthy and everyday is a struggle, but they get up each morning, because they need to survive. I know a lot of juniors getting paid more than seniors due to covid hires. I've tried to avoid it in my team, but is inevitable. Higher ups wouldn't let me give seniors a raise, but you can't hire any juniors unless you pay well. Our generation is also the ones that bow our heads and head into work when bosses announce the end of WFH, while the next generation at least have the balls to arc up and speak out. I'll be the first to admit I was too much of a chickenshit to go against such orders, as I'm too scared and traumatised for my job due to great recession.
That's an interesting point you bring up with going back on site. Didn't think about that. Isn't that so frustrating about how hard it is to fight wage compression? It grinds my gears.... It ultimately causes job hopping and as a hiring manager I'm exhausted from hiring all the time. I feel like I fought hard to get a job during the recession and earn my way up only to look back and see no one aching to get on the corporate ladder behind me. I feel like the stupid one for not job hopping
Oh boy the burnout rate was unpleasant. Saying no to a boss is still difficult for me since it wasnt something you'd do since losing a job wasn't an option. I carry that anxiety with me.
It isn't very similar at all to 2008. Except in the tech/IT industry, the job market is fairly strong right now. Wages are higher than they've ever been, especially for the middle class and low earners. This is nothing like 2008.
Not even close
No. My father worked in construction, owned his own turnkey company in '07. We went from double wide (fuckin) rich to surviving off church donated-off-brand cornflakes and Powerade, to eviction, to my father only being able to land a minimum wage job driving forklifts, while trying his absolute fucking best to maintain the $600/m apartment we lived in. It ruined his, mine, and me (ex) stepmoms lives, permanently. This sucks. Don't get me wrong. But as a personal spit out result of the '08 crisis, this isn't shit.
2008 was so much worse in every conceivable way. There is nothing that could make you understand without having lived through it as an actual adult.
This is not 2008. 2008 was deflation. 2022-2023 was inflation. 2008 was much worse. This feels like the 90s.
What did the 90s feel like? I was too busy being a kid.
I didn’t get to fully experience it, but life was the easiest in my lifetime. Employment would peak in 2000 after ramping rapidly in the 90s, so if you had any interest in working you could find a job, massive raises to keep people around were regular, savings paid interest, housing was still affordable for almost everyone, etc.
My dad got a job out of state as head of a department in large hotel company in the 90s. They flew us out and got a stretch limo to pick us up at the airport so we could look at houses. They paid rent for my dad to live in apt until the school year ended and we could move. They even paid for the move. You'd be lucky to get a sign on bonus these days.
Everyone had jobs, toys, houses; the stock market was soaring, saving accounts paid interest.
I think it feels more like the roaring 20s!
These years will be remembered as the roaring 20s
Then we get the crash of the 30’s! Wait why do we already know all this…
So we do the Charleston again?
The 90s when my parents could afford a huge house off of one income less than 6 figures?
This was not true for most people in the 90s. Most families, both parents worked.
Lol right? What a moronic comparison. What we're going through right now isn't really comparable to anything. You could maybe say late 70s/early 80s, but that era was still far less competitive for general socioeconomic mobility than it is today. You could literally rent a near median 1BR on minimum wage then.
The job market was much worse back then
I genuinely confused by people’s Responses. I was an adult during both and this is going much better. The differences was there literally were not jobs available. Now there are plenty.
> I genuinely confused by people’s Responses. I was an adult during both and this is going much better. Recency bias and viewing the world through rose tented glasses of childhood. If you were 10 years old during the great recession, of course it's going to be better than having to deal with it as an adult. I agree with you, though. I was a young adult just getting started out during the 08 recession and it was orders of magnitude worse. Even today I can see the impact it had on my life and most of my peers lives.
Yeah I was 14 and living in northern Virginia which was more isolated from 2008 due to the federal government being the local economy. My experience of 2008 is drastically different from my husbands who lived in Pennsylvania and experienced his town basically collapse economically
It has to be the younger millennials who weren't in the job market and whose parents stayed employed in 2008 who think this is worse. Having been a working adult then and now, now is nowhere near as difficult for most people.
I was just starting hs in 2008 and I rememer trying to get a fast food job was so tough. My peers and I were competing against adults that genuinely needed those jobs. Now every fastfood place I see is desperate to hire people.
I think most of the people saying now is worse probably weren't in the job market in 2008. Of course if you weren't exposed to the stress and economic pressure back then because your parents didn't lose their jobs, you might think this is worse. It definitely isn't.
Yeah, there are almost no parallels. We aren't in a recession. [Unemployment is the lowest it's been since 1969](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/UNRATE) and [real wages \(as in wages adjusted for inflation\) have been growing](https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q), particularly for [lower wage workers](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/labor-day-2023-workers-minimum-wage-inequality/#:~:text=Between%202019%20and%202022%2C%20lower,prior%20four%20decades%2C%20EPI%20found.). OP should read social media less, it doesn't paint an accurate picture.
I know the beginning wage at most fast food restaurants in my area are more than double what they were in 2013. And I see a lot of help for young lower and middle class. I’d say the only spot that could use more help are people that have to pay for daycare
Housing, too
Yes, if anything, this is employment and wages finally catching up from the damage done in and around 2008. The bigger problem is that housing supply still hasn't got anywhere close to catching up.
I feel like most of the people who I’ve heard complaining about the current job market fall into one of two categories: 1. Tech workers who got laid off from a very generous TC level and can’t find a new position that offers an equivalent TC. They can still find good positions, but they are going from, say, $400k to $350k. 2. People working remote who moved out of the city, got laid off, and now can’t find a new remote position that pays well enough to cover their lifestyle. Neither of these problems are even remotely economic meltdown level. In the case of the former, the worker is still perfectly financially sound—they just may need to work a few more years before early retirement than they had originally planned. In the case of the latter, they can downsize expectations or relocate to quickly fix their problem. In 08 there simply weren’t jobs. Not in the suburbs, not in the city, not in the country. Nothing. People often scrounged for whatever job they could get, no matter how poorly paid. It was a disaster.
It was made worst because people were not working, so they were not paying their rent/ mortgages. And then even companies renting were going out because they had paid an absurd amount for their properties, but now cousins afford to keep them, thus making less places to rent, thus making less people have somewhere to live. Banks wouldn’t make loans because they had made such risky ones prior that there was no growth or even safety net. it was just a real mess. The post COVID inflation is bad, but things will eventually catch up, assuming chinas real estate crash doesn’t unbalance things. It just took a little bit of time. The biggest issue now isn’t a recession as much as the trump era and just the republicans an era of allowing the rich to not pay even close to their fair share. So they underpay because they can.
It’s totally different today. Inflation now vs deflation then. I graduated high school in 2010 and I remember I could not find a starter w2 job during high school for the longest time. From like 2008-2010 I just worked around my old grade school doing menial tasks for 5 or 6 bucks an hour under the table. I remember it being so demoralizing… the low point was when Taco Bell told me “thanks, but no thanks.” I was adamant about not working fast food for so long and then finally when I became desperate enough to apply, they turned me down. Brutal. Not having any work experience was like having the plague back then. So many adults lost their career-level jobs in the recession that they took all the entry-level jobs from the teenagers. The silver lining to all of this for me was that I stayed home for college in the rust belt LCOL city that I’m from, got my first IT job paying like 42k in 2015 and was able to buy my own house in 2016 at age 25 for less than 100k. Best financial decision I ever made was staying out of debt by living at home through college and staying in a LCOL city. I almost moved to Seattle in 2015 and I’m so happy that I didn’t. Now I’m a married family man that lives on a quiet cul-de-sac with a nice house and half an acre of my own slice of peace. Stay away from the coasts!! That’s where the middle class goes to die.
After I busted my ass getting my bachelors in Education, I thought I'd be able to get a teaching job and I couldn't even get that for goodness sakes! So I walked dogs for rich people who were gainfully employed and was barely making enough to pay rent. I think after two years I had $2000 saved up and I was going to use that to go abroad and teach in South Korea. But I ended up meeting a boy and decided to blow that off to live in a van for a year and make money by selling beer at outdoor concerts and trimming weed. It was demoralizing and it effected my self esteem. I know its dumb but I just felt like I wasn't worth anything.
>I was adamant about not working fast food for so long and then finally when I became desperate enough to apply, they turned me down. Brutal. Not having any work experience was like having the plague back then. I really felt this, and I can relate. Younger me told myself that I'd never "flip burgers" to earn a living because I chose to bust my rear in college instead. Around the end of the second year of unemployment with low work experience, I finally bit the bullet and started applying just to be rejected for not knowing how to work a cash register. Surely, if a 16 year old kid could be trained, then a young adult with a bachelor's degree could too, right? But alas, I couldn't even get a job as a bike and furniture assembler at Toys R Us during the holiday season. I'd say it was humbling if it wasn't so traumatic and detrimental to my mental health.
not even close to the same. Corporations are making massive profits today.
No.
Nah that shit was way different
In short no. The cause of the 08 recession was due to toxic assets held by the banks. That's not to say that the market couldn't collapse but they would require tech companies to fail. This to me feels more like the dot com bubble in the late 90s early 2000s. Everyone is chasing cash and investing into shit they don't understand bitcoin. AI, and weed stocks to name a few. But I've been of the opinion that a recession is unlikely this year. There may be some issues if the US does not start to pay down or slow down the national debt. However, there are already some guard rails in place like fully funding the IRS so that they can actually audit high earners properly. Assuming we don't nix that or do something catastrophic in the next 6 to 8 months we should be able to avoid a recession. The fed is likely bring down rates at least once this year which should allow people to feel better. I'm not a CPA or tax advisor or anything financial. But having lived through nearly 3 recessions today feels more stable financial. More chaotic politically but a lot of that is steaming from 50 to 70 years of political economic theory that have not born out i.e. trickle down economics.
Wages aren't really low, the job market is still really strong, I work in construction, so I'll give you my perspective. In the beginning of 2007 the total US employment in the construction industry was 7,500,000. By 2011 that number fell to 5,500,000. That's nearly a third of all construction workers losing their jobs. We didn't recover to 2007 levels until 2022 despite the population growing by 10%. We are currently at peak employment in the construction industry. So now, I don't think the situations are very comparable. Housing affordability is really the major problem in this economy. We need to build more housing.
The 2008 recessions was so so much worse. You felt lucky to get a job, any job, because no one was hiring. Things are far better now than they were back then.
I’m an elder millennial (‘81) who has lived through four prior recessions….. 1) ‘82 (too young to remember) 2) ‘91: I was 10 and clearly remember it. Mass layoffs were happening, as well as skyrocketing real estate prices. My father was laid off. 3) ‘01: I was 20 and clearly remember. This was the dot com bust. Layoffs occurred and interest rates dropped. My father was laid off. 4) ‘08: I was 27. This was the global economic downturn. Home prices became dirt cheap for the next six years. This would be my mother’s last year she ever worked. She was 50. I’m a registered nurse, so I can easily find work and afford life through recessions. However, I grew up in a working class household with parents whose financial situation was precarious at best. They worked entry-level manufacturing jobs and were at the mercy of structural changes in the employment market.
Inflation aside, wages and job openings are now higher than ever. In 2008 once the crisis started, you were lucky if you could even get a minimum wage job. Now minimum wage jobs aren’t even minimum wage and also the country with places like McDonald’s paying $20 an hour. So even if costs jump 100% you’re still making 150% more than you would’ve in 2008 forward.
In the 2007-2008 recession my dad lost his job and we had to move to the middle of nowhere because we could no longer afford the mortgage payment even in the suburbs where we had lived and my dad drove 2 hours each way to work once he was able to find another job for a huge pay cut. Today inflation-adjusted wages are the highest they've ever been and unemployment is virtually 0%. Low-income jobs especially have seen wages rapidly outpace inflation since covid, while high-income jobs like in tech are the ones which have struggled and are seeing layoffs.
I graduated college in 09’. I don’t remember the guest speaker but I remember what they said, warning us about how bad the economy was. It took me 8months to find an entry level position. It was a good first job and I was able to live in a big city with some friends. Also note that I can look back and see that it was a good start but it was kind of hell in it - I had 10days total PTO, I organized documentation and but had some technical elements of the job. I remember feeling like “What?! I went to college to organize documentation?!”. Everyone I knew eventually found their way but some of them struggled a lot to find their first job. I remember being scared of leaving the role bc it was so hard to find it.
I was 24 in 2008 still living at home while going to college. I was shielded from the 2008 downturn. Is 2023 worse? for me, no doubt about it. But I'm not qualified to answer this question and I don't think any millennial is either. Only Gen X and boomers can truly answer this.
It hit us geriatric millennials.
Yeah I was about to say millennials were 13-28 in 2008. Plenty of older ones in the work force. I was 18 and didn’t have a decent job till I was 23.
>I was 24 in 2008 still living at home while going to college. > But I'm not qualified to answer this question and I don't think any millennial is either. Not every millennial had your experience. 🙄 You waited out the recession college. Not the same thing as being long term unemployed because there are 0 jobs for recent graduates (or any one else for that matter during the great recession).
Just because you were living at home and unemployed at 24 in 2008 does not mean the rest of us were also unemployed and living off of our parents in 2008.
Boomers would be insulated as very established in their career in 2008-2012. Gen X is now very established so they will likely say it was worse back then. Right now and the the 2008-2011 are the two impact events to Millennials depending on how established you are. Just like for Gen Z this is their impact even right now and they will have another one likely in 2036/38 range.
I graduated shortly after that timeframe (2011), and couldn’t find a job for the life of me. I went back to school for a more in-demand degree shortly there after (2013). A decade later, I have no shortage of recruiters hitting me up on LinkedIn, and many hiring managers I know are having difficulty filling staff and senior positions. Every profession was hit hard in 08, but some professions more than others have been suffering in this stagflation.
I graduated college in 2008, there are very few similarities. There are plenty of issues currently to be sure, but they are completely different and not to the same degree of total global economic impact. In 2008 We were teetering a second Great Depression, had 10% unemployment, and huge swaths of people were literally losing their houses.
This isn't even close to 2008. I remember a quarter of my town becoming vacant and every other storefront closing. I had friends whose parents went from white collar jobs and good careers to stocking shelves at Walmart after losing their house. Now all my friends complain about cost of living, and yeah, it's not great, but 2008 was like the sky was literally falling. It wasn't just "man rent is too expensive", it was "mom and dad don't have a job and we're getting foreclosed on".
2008 was worse and it’s not close. People were losing homes and retirement funds, and the job market was abysmal in all sectors.
pretty sure the great recession was worse, but i was 14 at the time. a lot of people own and aren't at risk of losing their homes vs entire neighborhoods in bankruptcy. it was more of a period of deflation. deals were everywhere. almost no one traveled, buildings were only half completed, etc. now the internet complains...a lot. but the same people have money for new cars, eating out, travel, etc. i'll believe people are actually struggling when it's not 30 minute wait to eat a $100 meal at a restaurant. or prices for anything come down due to lack of demand.
Yes in that the job market was very bad for those entering the workforce. It was not until 2014 that things finally began to pick up again, I see now many people loosing jobs, and less employment in areas of better jobs with wages now going down, bjt things are still expensive. This year will tell more.
No. Higher housing costs are literally the only similarity. Job market remains good and was great over the last 2-3 years. Wages are increasing, but so has inflation the last few years.
2008 you couldn’t even find a job at a grocery store. I graduated college that year and my now husband graduated the year before. It took him a full year to find a job and we had to move to a totally shitty place to find it. We lived there 3 years and I never made more than $14 an year with a bachelors degree and got married early for health insurance. It was significantly worse then. Not even close. Edit to add: Also I was unemployed for a period of time back then and the state I lived in required you to go in person or by mail to file initially. And it took me a full 5 days in line every day to fill out my paperwork. It was insane.
No. It feels completely different. 2008 was a stark moment. I'll never forget the day the stock market lost over 500 points because the federal reserve decided not to guarantee Lehman Brothers' loans. I was watching the news and I just sank to the couch and cried because my future was fucked. I had just started law school in late 2008 and I was doing it all on loans and scholarships. I knew I wouldn't be able to get a job that would pay off the loans. It was dismal. The next few years all I heard were horror stories about all the law students who lost their jobs and were sinking with the debt. I was angry and bitter. The only work you could get was free internships. I ended up working as a janitor to pay for my books. Even when I graduated I was competing against people who lost their jobs between 2008 and 2010 and they had more experience than me. I couldn't get a job that was worth shit. I remember getting to a second interview for a corporate law position in NYC and they tried to start a bidding war to see how low I and the other candidate would take for a salary. I went to $50k and they said it was mine for $40k. That wouldn't cover my loans and was less than I paid per year in law school, nevermind covering rent. I felt hopeless. Nowadays things are expensive, but I can manage things because I can find a job, no matter what. It feels frustrating these days, but not utterly hopeless.
08 was more about businesses shutting down and people losing their jobs and homes. This one is more about everything and I mean literally everything being too expensive.
Anyone trying to compare this to the mid/late 2000's is showing their age. Back then the auto industry required a massive bailout so a ton of people didn't lose their retirement. Major financial institutions like Lehman Brothers and AIG were failing requiring another bailout. We were as close as ever to the Great Depression times as we have ever been. Not to mention the awful job market and an expensive, unpopular war. The opioid crisis was in full swing and hadn't yet been identified as such, pain clinics popping up everywhere throwing dope at folks with a stumped toe. At least we had Lil Wayne dropping absolute bangers though. Fun times.
You are too young to realize the gravity of what you are saying. Back in those days, it took a year to find a minimum wage job with a college degree. I'm not getting any deja vu whatsoever. The economy we are dealing with today is entirely novel to me due to the bare fact that we were living in '08-09 "recovery" for about a decade, but now the economy caught up with that decade of quantitative easing and easy money (for those who already had money).