I am very out of the loop with economy and politics but the economic crisis is slowly taking its toll and I wondered what the likelihood of seeing the end soon is.
Is this like the ’08 recession even though we aren’t technically in a recession? What difference does it make being in a recession and not?
Is it ever likely to get better? If so, realistically, when?
In: 2
The UK is being adversely affected by numerous factors:
– Brexit – making importing consumer goods more expensive, making selling our products more expensive to potential customers abroad. More money buying less stuff for our general public, impacts the on the cost of living, prices go up.
– Stagnating wages. After 2008, money was cheap. Everybody borrowed, including the Government, and it all got squandered on dodgy schemes and incentives, tax cuts for the wealthy etc. It should have been invested in business, in infrastructure, in productivity, in investing in skills etc. As a result, businesses must recruit more workers to do the same job as perhaps two or three workers twenty years ago, even with the advent of modern computing etc. As a result, businesses are paying people less, but hiring more people.
– Covid – absolutely caused more hardship than it needed to, thanks to the haphazard way that most of the global players handled it financially. Printing money into an already bloated global system didn’t seem like a bad idea right up until the cost of the borrowing starts to hit home. A lot of important sectors in the UK got ravaged by Covid and are only just starting to recover.
– War in Ukraine – wheat, oil, minerals, raw materials all stuck in country despite a new agreement not to attack/seize international shipping. It still means delays and the price of these products shooting up across the globe.
– Liz Truss and the Kamikwaze Budget – this nearly totally fucked the economy. Some of the biggest hedge funds and pension funds in the country nearly hit the wall because of a reckless national budgetary plan that involved borrowing loads more than we could afford to repay. We will be living this nightmare for years to come as the country repairs the damage it did.
– Profiteering – a lot of companies are claiming that they are just passing the cost onto the consumer but it’s just not true. Plenty of companies are taking this chance to use the market conditions to their advantage and charge higher prices, well, because they can.
Let’s be clear here, the UK is not in a recession (yet, maybe it wont) but millions are suffering still, more so than in recent living memory.
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