When you live in a country where some of the greatest concerns for most people include, losing weight, whether they should buy a new car this year, whether they should take a stay cation or vacation, you need to maintain perspective.
The "great" recession was very painful for many people. However to misquote an entertaining TV financial advisor is a slightly different light, there is always a recession somewhere. Even in boom times we have people who lose jobs, get foreclosed on and unfortunately significant numbers of homeless people.
What happened last year was that a proliferation of financial hubris let major firms chase profits into high risk areas, many of which were related to housing and when the risk materialized and the Government didn't bail out one of the firms, we had a financial scare.
The loss of credit and the panic in the stock markets, led to a belief that we were in the worst financial crisis since the great depression. That remains to be seen as economic historians examine the data, but clearly, in hindsight it looks a lot more like a regular recession with some unique characteristics.
Now the businesses that survived and most of them did, took this opportunity to greatly increase productivity through cost cuts and layoffs. They are not going to reintroduce those costs or employees until they really need to.
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