Is It Just Me?

Livingthedream

bo_drinker wrote: »

I honestly think we are only at the beginning and all that is being done is getting us nowhere ??

Depends on how much Brown wants to win the next election

geoffky

What to remember is the great crash of 1929 most people in fact 90% of the people lost their money when the market had collapsed 90% and they thought it could not go down any more...people who think buy now on 20% most will be in negative equity within the year..

treliac

In 1929 we didn't have the welfare system we have now. How are we going to pay the burgeoning benefits bill as the recession bites deeper and deeper?

JonnyBravo

fatpig wrote: »

There were saying the same thing in the 1930's viz

I think you'll find Viz was only launched in 1979

StevieJ

pizzagirl wrote: »

The government said a few months ago that the recession would be over mid 2009. I nearly fell off my stool when I heard that load of nonsense.. :rotfl:No recession has ever lasted only a few months.

After that I have treated all government announcements, predictions and assurances with the contempt they deserve.

This is going to last many years, we're only at the beginning.

The 1990/91 recession lasted Q3 90 TO Q3 91, so if this was a normal recession their prediction wan't stupid, especially as the first period where we had no growth was Q2 2008.

GDP
1990 1991
Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
73.9 73.0 72.6 72.5 72.3 72.0 72.1

tomterm8

Dan: wrote: »

Firms always want to save money, esp staffing levels. I guarantee that some companies will use the recession as an excuse to cut numbers and threaten redundancy to improve performance.

My girlfriend's company is doing just this - their workload has almost doubled in the last 12 months (due to major new contract) but have reduced staff levels considerably. So now all staff are not only producing double the output from this time last year, they are also scared sh!tless of being made redundant, whereas the firms profits significantly increase.

Temporarily. And then, when things recover, all your best tallent moves to the opposition.

StevieJ wrote: »

The 1990/91 recession lasted Q3 90 TO Q3 91, so if this was a normal recession their prediction wan't stupid, especially as the first period where we had no growth was Q2 2008.

GDP
1990 1991
Q2 Q3 Q4 Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4
73.9 73.0 72.6 72.5 72.3 72.0 72.1

The IMF did a survey of banking crises, and on average they last twice as long as a normal recession.

julieq

Woot, fortunes to be made short selling just about everything then. Maybe the uber bears could just get on with doing that instead of indulging their Cassandra complexes here?

The fact is that no-one knows what's going to happen. What is certainly historically the case is that the masses tend to work on the basis of straight line extrapolation, where actual market turns aren't anything like that predictible. It's as irrational to project straight lines down as it is straight lines up. Hoogstraten, who was a shrewd investor as well as having less attractive attributes, often said that markets worked in sine waves and mocked the general public as usually bailing out at the end of the straight line before the curve back. There's a lot of truth in that, although a lot of people here are able to quote from newspapers, most of what you get here is classic straight line thinking.

What we have I suspect is an acute outbreak of "I told you so" from a group of people (or more accurately the disciples of people) who were lampooned as misery guts as the bubble inflated, and now find themselves on the podium having correctly predicted that the bubble would burst. It was bound to burst, it'll inflate again. Being right then doesn't buy you a crystal ball.