Sunday, November 02, 2008 Sun.star Essay: Recession By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.star essay
NOT only in America is there a “financial mess” after “five years of breakneck growth.” The sorry condition is affecting the rest of the world, as you know.
Things are bad, say opposition politicians. Not quite, say some economists. But let’s not be complacent, say the careful hopefuls.
When you don’t quite understand the run of the economy the way you can trace a survivor’s trail on TV, you leave it to those who know and you simply feel.
Be happy, despite everything, says the government. The price spikes lost force a bit, it says.
Looks good when inflation rate goes down and it is going down in Central Visayas, the statistics go.
But, hey, not quite.
Consider how the inflation rate this year alone has increased almost 8 times, says a news item, while last year, it only rose
by 1.9 percent in September.
Whether or not we understand fully the true grain of the economic slowdown in America and anywhere else, we can feel it, they’re all talking about it.
Some analysts are saying that a few changes in modern living haven’t been noticed through these few years until now with what IMF sees, as American recession in 2008.
There are the economic shifts these days the world over. For one, the analysts are pointing at the “resilience of emerging markets.” They’re saying that perhaps now, the US economy doesn’t entirely (or in the near future will not) affect the rest of the world as much.
The world’s economic growth this time will be slower than before the recent Wall Street crash, but not as badly, they say. There will probably be a shift.
But the US downtrend, although not as bad as in the Great Depression of the ‘30s and not even considered by some as recession per se, is seen to linger, recovery will take longer, and this is not welcomed.
In the ‘30s, there were businesses filing bankruptcy, farmers losing their markets, people losing jobs, banks incapable of lending out, the nation losing hope. People in the cities lost homes, formed lines for government food, the farmers with no one to buy their crops staying in camps called Hooversvilles named after Pres. Herbert Hoover.
The Great Depression was preceded by The Roaring Twenties when everyone was partying the night through (or that’s how it would sound)--the time of writers Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Jazz Age, Charles Lindbergh in his first solo plane flight, sports star Babe Ruth strong on the bases..
When the economic disaster struck, writers like John Steinbeck and William Faulkner would later write painful stories in novels about the Great Depression poor in America.
One effect of the depression was a change in the role of women as working personalities. When jobs were becoming scarce, women were the first ones to let go, to come home and stay to be mothers and wives again. The influence of women in the family also increased, especially when the men lost their jobs and were drawn into depression and stagnancy, feeling shamed, left with no more ambition.
A senior economist Heather Boushey, sees this happening quietly. “We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was.” They had first thought it was the “motherhood movement” as reason for some American women, within a year or two ago, dropping out from the labor force to be mothers and wives again. This looked like the result of personal decisions.
But no.
It’s about an “unfriendly economy”
Will the world ever reach this point, perhaps, like the US in an economic disaster in the ‘30s? After the stock market crash in 1929, there was only stale food (even garbage), no jobs, no money, no home. Imagine America impoverished.
Today, the unemployment rate has gone up in March, jobs have come and gone, there’s no money with which to buy consumers’ delights that 70 percent of American buyers are used to.
Who knows exactly what’s coming next? But coming slowly?
