[global economy rant warning]
Sadly we are all victims of our own greed, Corporate company greed, government greed and short sightedness. Changes in manufacturing from high skill hand/machine work to high levels of automation create large volumes of products -(mass production) where you have mass production you have to have a global market rather than your local skill/local market and of course you get lower prices (to a degree) but most certainly huge profits.
The governments encourage the normal man in the street to buy into shares because this inflates the share market that had up to that point fairly steady growth of just over inflation as prices rose and your boom begins.
Company returns to the share holders become more important than the workforce, that is rapidly shrinking anyway as automation is introduced and for those left skill levels are reduced to machine minder, and the search for lower overheads begins. Step up to the plate Taiwan, China, India, Hongkong, Japan and a few others with high levels of man power, skilful trainable rural populations who can work for pennies because their rural income is basic subsistence.
Add on to that greedy governments who see a way to become world economic powers and you have the drive to ignore health and safety, worker welfare, pollution and planning issues so factories can be thrown up to get on the band wagon.
We on the receiving end take the cheap goods because it appears to make our standard of living go up because our money buys more often at a reduced quality BUT at some point the piper has to be paid. Our job base has been sold aboard without jobs we become service industries, middle men for the far eastern economy if you like, we rely on the financial markets for a work base feeding the monster that is supplying us. When those financial industries get hungry they start to supply money to people of all types whos ability to pay back may well be fragile or non-existent.
The recipe for disaster has been assembled disaster when, not if, is the question. Well, the time is now and it is going to hurt. Large corporations are crying in their beer, most countries have had to bail out their banking system. For us, the man in the street, if you have a job and can keep it your lucky, if you have savings their value is in decline. Prices will/have to go up reducing our standard of living. For those young enough never to have experienced hard times who have few skills and little will to economise or make do it will be a very hard lesson.
Unfortunately this is a genie that you cant get back in the bottle. Perhaps best placed will be those who have skills they can sell/barter locally or those who have little dependence on the wider global economy (my personal choice) and who have little or no debt. There are interesting times ahead for the foreseeable future no matter what your President, Priminister, Government say this will take several years to subside and may never get back to the peaks of recent years. We, the global we, asked for it! IMHO
[/global economy rant warning]
