The credit crunch

I hear exactly the same thing from the South American crowd I tend to hang around with. The older ones (50+) are starting to go back home as they're just fed up with it.

When did this start to become "acceptable" I left Skoo in 1989, it certainley wasn't our lifeplan then, nor my brothers lot who left in 1995. It's definitely a recent thing IMO.

Damn right, people respect them for it too. On the street behind my brother oop North there's two families of Poles moved in and they were viewed with some suspicion being foreign (There's never been Blacks, Asians or Foreigners in the village that we can remember!). Now they're known as decent folk, well liked and the two builder sons are working for the local building firm owned by a BNP member.

Mike P

Reply to
Mike P
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Move somewhere less pikey then - tempting fate by saying it, but in the nine years we've lived at the current place, we've never had anything more lifted other than a pair of flashing hubcaps I got free with Max Power and shoved on the boys BMX... and even they were returned after the usual scumbag kid from up the road was identified as the culprit.

This is in the face of me, in the past, leaving all manner of kit on the drive - tools, bicycles, motorcycles etc.

We're not out in the sticks either - 10 minutes walk from the city centre?

Reply to
JackH

On 1 Nov, 22:31, "Tim" wrote:

That's what they call a "correction". Share prices valued over and above their real worth, thanks to speculation. Same goes for house prices and commodities. Prices for essentials like food and fuel have risen. Non-essentials like laptops, plasma tellies, ipods have dropped. So have clothes thanks to the likes of Primark. The reality is though, food prices have been unnaturally low for some time and corrections can happen in either direction. The sustainability of cheap chinese clothes is also in question.

But let's take a look at the evidence... manufacturing in this country is almost finished as it's cheaper to manufacture stuff in places further and further East. The "new manufacturing" was call centres and they're now in the East. Our youth (and a large proportion of grown- ups have been dragged down too) are obsessed with this whole celebrity s**te and see talentless, lazy fuckups seemingly living it up so treat them as role models. So to an extent we relied a lot on the hard working, honest new EU members to get stuff done and they're buggering off. Second and third generation Indians are going back to India and seeing gaps in the market there to make serious money just by being more organised than people who grew up there. And tens, no hundreds of thousands of educated white middle class folks are leaving every year to make better lives for themselves in France, Spain, Italy, Australia, New Zealand and so-on. Eventually we'll be left with the unskilled, unmotivated pram-faced scumbags and the asylum seekers, who if genuine, are probably quite psychologically damaged by the ordeals they're escaping from.

The Pound will weaken, attracting more people to holiday here. Our main industry will become tourism, thanks to all the fascinating history, the breathtaking vistas (particularly in the North, Wales and Scotland) and the monarchy. Our multiculturalism will become a real advantage as we will be able to provide bi, tri or quad lingual people to communicate with visitors from all over the world. The weak pound and the strong Rupee and Yuan will see Indian and Chinese backpackers coming to Britain for a cheap holiday where they can bum around enjoying themselves for little outlay. Eventually some of these people will like the place so much that they'll set up factories where they can manufacture stuff cheaply to export back home...

When Gordon Brown said "no more boom and bust" it was the biggest lie any politician has ever uttered. It is a mathematical impossibility for a free market economy to boom continuously. The world economy was faltering early on in this decade, then all the war spending since

9/11 has propped things up somewhat. That wasn't totally sustainable though so it was then made fashionable to see your home as some kind of investment. Houses went up, people felt rich and they could borrow vast sums of money against their rising "property" values to splurge on a little bit of this celebrity culture, buying expensive cars, posh clothes and fancy holidays. This was supplemented by the increasing acceptabilty and easy obtainability of credit card debt, loans and so- on. Ownership, ownership, ownership. You were valued by your posessions and not your deeds. We moved further and further from a "respect" economy into a purely materialistic, vacuous and shallow "lifestyle' economy. Of course this couldn't continue. Eventually nobody normal could afford a house. This was accelerated by the sub- prime crisis in the US (where all this nonsense started in the first place) so people who wanted to buy and could just about afford it were now denied a mortgage. Everyone suddenly realised, after years and years of denial that houses were ridiculously overvalued, that they were up to their eyeballs in debt and were utterly reliant on their jobs to maintain the repayments and put food on the table. Interest rates and fuel costs began to rise, putting the squeeze onto people who hadn't quite started to feel it yet. The first reports of financial instability filtered through and people started to panic as they faced bankruptcy and even homelessness if they lost that job or were even forced to take a cut in hours or pay. Posh cars were put up for sale and people started cutting down on spending and tried to pay back their debts a little more quickly. This caused a bit of a retail slump, sending shops into a panic and causing them to slash their fat margins. Then all the banks started falling over. It was faceless rich city boys and girls who were fleeing Notting Hill and handing back the keys to their Bentleys. Everyone enjoyed a bit of schadenfreude and breathed a sigh of relief that it was the rich who were losing their jobs (and they could afford to, having probably made more money than they could possibly spend and be set up for life anyway).

Because everyone's now used to this instant-gratification culture and the whole credit crunch thing's been in the news for ages without too detrimental effect on their own lives, ordinary people are thinking that everything is going to be OK. In their hollywood-inspired world view, the credit crunch/recession would result in the instant loss of everyone's job and people queueing for bread outside a recently- nationalised Tescos. As that hasn't happened, they've ventured back into town where they've realised how cheap everything suddenly is and out come the credit cards. Because it's a bargain, you're saving money! No you're spending it and if you didn't really need it and bought it because it was cheap, that's still spending money. It is comical how spending less has become kind of fashionable. "I'm really proud of myself. Because of the credit-crunch I've only had two manicures and one bikini wax this month. And I've been drinking regular soy-chai-latt=E9 instead of grand=E9"

This has been a long, long boom, unnaturally propped up twice. The bigger the bubble, the bigger the pop. It's going to be an interesting couple of years.

Reply to
fishman

Krispy Kreme have a Kredit Krunch special offer at the moment in Bluewater!

Reply to
Tim S Kemp

Bravo!!!

Reply to
Pete M

That's because people are too lazy to make a sandwich...

Reply to
Bob Sherunckle

Fuck me. Nowhere did I state where I'd heard these stories. I'm talking about Poles on building sites all over the place having tools pinched during tea breaks etc...

Reply to
Doki

Krispy Kreme donuts are a perfect example of all that is wrong with the economy in this country... and the waistlines. ;-)

Reply to
JackH

Oh right.

Well in that case, fair comment - Pater is a plumber and has had the odd tool lifted by 'accident' when working on site with others, too.

Reply to
JackH

It's only to be expected.

I think we should actually all move to uk.rec.cars.cliché.

Reply to
Pete M

I think you *should* move to the Czech Republic asap, and stop talking about it... given how crime free it is over there according to you, they'll be all off guard and you'll have a field day reverting to type and leaving motors up on bricks etc.

Sorry, did someone mention something about cliches? ;-)

Reply to
JackH

Yea but it's not just about where you live, that's just a little bit of it. We've lived here since it was a new build 23 years ago, and we've never had anything nicked/vandalised, hell we've never even had an egg chucked at the house on Halloween or mischief night.

But, unfortunately, I used to have to go other places, such as Leeds. One incident stands out where I was on the teenage cancer ward, and a guy walked in, late at night, and started trying to nick the TV. When a nurse questioned who he was, he legged it, leaving a TV half covered in a bin bag, and plenty of his fingerprints which a copper dusted.

So, whilst the bit of society where I live is nice, the other bits I have experience of aren't always as nice. I mean, what kind of scumbag would try and steal a TV from a children's cancer ward? St James though is of course right next to Chapletown in Leeds, an area known for housing some of the most unpleasent members of society. There is a cemetary just near St James as well, and once when I was in hospital a story came on the local news about how the police had found a body in there - in 4 bags. Then there was the stabbing in broad daylight in the main entrance, where I'd been 15 minutes previously. And finally of course, the shooting, in broad day light, which was again somewhere I'd been a short while before...

Reply to
DanB

The credit crunch has hit all the people that cashed in on the rising value of their homes by re-mortgaging every year. They won't be getting a new Merc this year or going on that cruise.

HA HA HA.

Reply to
Peter Hill

Hmmmm, Krispy Kreme. Sorry did I miss something there?

Reply to
Elder

They did indeed. However, as an ex-fat bastards, I resisted temptation..

Mike P

Reply to
Mike P

Germans smoke everywhere, except where it is forbidden (and enforced), they drop their ends on the floor too, but that is the only litter you see. And they are constantly being swept to keep it looking tidy.

Reply to
Elder

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