These days, there are more than just a few reasons why this recession has hit in a very surprising way. The latest revelation is that at the peak of the economic crisis, in March 2008, the unemployment rate was still a whopping 22%. Even though the unemployment rate has been falling all year, the number of Americans in this position is still high and many are finding themselves in even more economic distress each hour of each day.
This is the reality of economic hardship.
I was recently interviewing a young man and after we get into some real detail about his personal situation and how he’s been feeling about the economy, I asked him what his biggest issue is. He says it’s feeling angry. This is the point where he broke down and actually cried a few tears. The biggest thing he wanted to do was get his money back and have his bank release his collateral so that he can get back to work.
Many of us (including me to some extent) really didn’t have any idea what was happening with banks on Wall Street. Our world had totally changed after the savings and loan crisis and the housing crash. Then, the economy quickly tanked in the early to middle part of the decade. But, while we were talking this afternoon, a friend of mine started telling me that he too had suffered a very big fall. He just could never see it coming.
“In the late 1990s, I was doing some college counseling. We were discussing the impact the world was having on our lives, and it turned out, we were discussing how much more difficult it was going to be for most people than people on Wall Street, on Main Street, and in the middle-class. Now you can go online and find plenty of information about the impact of credit card debt and the financial crisis itself.
The recent revelation is that the recession really comes from what happened in the middle of the last decade. With all of the talk that the financial system was failing and a bubble was popping, this time, it’s all in our own heads, and most people believe like I do that the housing bubble is a larger issue than actually the financial system. I think it is safe to say that the housing bubble was the biggest financial failure since the great depression itself.
I am very new to this topic. However, this information is really quite interesting. In 2004, we were hit by the worst economic crisis since WW2. We now face the same kind of unemployment and unemployment is the issue we face. It is very much true that banks, money lenders, and people in general just dont think of the recession the same way we do.