1 week Ago By Aimee Meade
“As if we’re going back to 2008 and another global recession.” That was the text that I woke up to this week in a groupchat of friends. Another messaged: “Might look at my pension account for a laugh” and reported that it had already lost 10 per cent of its value.
Welcome to the new age of economic panic – and it’s starting to feel a lot like the past. A quick recap for anybody who isn’t glued to the liveblog of their financial publication of choice: On 2 April, Donald Trump imposed a minimum 10 per cent tariff on all imports to the US. The past week has seen the stock market swing harder than an executioner’s axe during Henry VIII’s reign – $10trn (£7.
8trn) has been wiped off the values of stocks so far.Wall Street bankers who lined up to praise Trump’s pro-business Maga agenda are now eating their words. In a sign of just how unhinged everything has become, a false report claiming that Trump was considering a 90-day pause on tariffs went viral and caused stocks to rally – only to plunge again when the White House dismissed it as “fake news”.
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addToArray({"pos": "inread-hb-ros-inews"}); }Now JP Morgan is warning that the US is likely to be heading into a recession, and at least seven more investment banks have upgraded their recession risk forecast accordingly. In the words of my Good Bad Billionaire co-host, the BBC business editor Simon Jack, this doesn’t necessarily mean a global recession is on the cards – but “the chances are clearly much higher”. Among my millennial cohort, there’s been a sinking feeling that I can only describe as: here we go again.
Many of us graduated from university during the 2008 financial crisis – we navigated a world of shrinking career opportunities and depressed wages, taking whatever jobs we could get our hands on.‘When we’re in our eighties or nineties and look back on our youth, what are we going to remember?’According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, millennials only caught up with the wages of pre-2008 graduates when we hit our early thirties. That period of low earnings had lasting effects on our ability to save and put money into our pensions or buy property.
In fact, new research by Hargreaves Lansdown and Oxford Economics has found that, after any pension contributions, millennials are currently only saving £171 every month – about £100 less than our Gen X elders.You would think one once-in-a-generation shock was enough, but no. In the run-up to the Brexit vote in 2016, poll after poll showed that those under 35 wanted to remain in the EU.
Voters over 45, however, had other plans – and our ability to travel and work freely across Europe was torn up. Then, of course, came the Covid-19 pandemic. As the world went into lockdown, more than one in six people under the age of 30 – the majority of them millennials – were out of work.
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addToArray({"pos": "mpu_tablet_l1"}); }That’s not forgetting the current housing crisis. In 1990, over half of 25- to 34-year-olds owned their homes. These days, rents are soaring and you’d be lucky to get on the housing ladder without the help of the Bank of Mum and Dad, particularly in cities like London.
Oh, and then there’s the small matter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and its effect on oil and gas prices and inflation leading to a cost of living crisis. And now Tariffgate.Trump shrugged off the roiling economic chaos on Monday, telling reporters on Air Force One: “Sometimes you have to take the medicine.
” If this is the medicine, when will they send the ambulance? I think the patient might be going into cardiac arrest. #color-context-related-article-3575367 {--inews-color-primary: #3759B7;--inews-color-secondary: #EFF2FA;--inews-color-tertiary: #3759B7;} Read Next square NICOLA HORLICK I'm a finance expert - boomers will be the last generation of rich pensionersRead MoreIn 2018, I interviewed the American ethnographer and author Kristen Ghodsee. We ended up talking about generational differences and how one’s worldview and politics might be coloured by epochal moments.
As a young woman, Ghodsee recalled the feeling of jubilation when the Berlin Wall fell, marking an end to the paranoia of the Cold War. Then she asked me if I could recall any similarly seismic and positive moments in my own timeline. The best I could do was the 2012 London Olympics – and even then, that was uniquely specific to the fact that I was living in the capital.
Of course, millennials aren’t the only ones who will be affected by Trump’s devil-may-care attitude to world trade. But there is something uniquely dispiriting about living out your youth and your early middle age and never knowing economic peace or prosperity. When we’re in our eighties or nineties and look back on our youth, what are we going to remember? I dread to think.
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author, and podcaster.
