How many remember the recession of the 1970's? I was not quite a teenager but

[blondeatlast]

I do; it wasn't fun, but it wasn't a depression, either (which my parents remembered, I was a late-in-life baby).

So I'm just curious who remembers that; we've got a choice between that and hell. I'll take the former.

[Vinca]

1. It's very strange. We bought our first home during that period

and, other than gas shortages, I have no memory of that recession.

[gateley]

4. I wasn't personally affected, except for gas lines. I was able to pay for

my rent, utilities, gas, etc., with my wages. Now people are having to get two jobs just to cover those basics.

[melody]

2. I remember it distinctly. I was a teenager

It was bad but we survived it. There was all manner of talk about $5 bread back then, too (of course, I just paid that for bread last night). We'll get through this one, too.

[SmokingJacket]

3. I grew up in the 70's -- it felt like normal life.

My parents were middle class, but we got most of our clothes second-hand. Never had a new car until I was a teen in the 80's. We were always turning the thermostat down...

I still think this way --

[rvablue]

29. Matches my story to a tee

Life was normal.
My parents were frugal and yeah, we too got second hand clothes.
The only thing I can remember being weird were the gas lines and going on the hunt for gas, but that only seemed to be for several months.

[no_hypocrisy]

5. The price of gas went from 39 cents per gallon to 50-something,

like a 70 percent increase within the space of five years. And after that period concluded, you would not see any price listed using the "cent" sign. Everything was a fractionalized dollar.

[Union Thug]

6. My family was doing better at the peak of the 70's recession..

than most working (blue collar) families are doing today.

My dad was the primary wage earner - mom didn't work. Things got tight, but we were not terribly bad off.

Things got bad for my family during the Reagan years. No comparison. My dad lost wages and benefits as a result of the attack on organized labor and we, like other working class families, were far worse off under the so-called Reagan boom than under late 70s recession.

[Peacetrain]

7. Oh I do...

Hubby graduated college in 1978, could not find a job. When it came to buying a house, we got a steal in 1980 with only 12% interest ..yep, it was not the great depression, but it was no cake walk either for family farms, so many lost, now so much of it is corporate farms or out of state owners.

Union busting in the early 80's with that nut job reagan at the helm.

~sigh~, but for the most part we were not internationally owned like now. This is a whole new ball game

[faithfulcitizen]

27. 12% was a steal then. My parents talk about the going rate of 16%.

[Raineyb]

28. Didn't we used to actually make stuff back then too?

What do we make in this country now besides bad paper?

I don't think there's such a thing as an economy that has no manufacturing you can't increase value by pushing the same bank notes around.

:shrug:

Regards

[Kurt_and_Hunter]

8. The late 1970s was stagflation. The economy was merely slow, but

inflation was very high, so it had the effect of a bad recession.

Stagflation was not cured by Reagan, as RW types claim. It was cured by Fed Chairman Paul Volker shocking the economy into the worst economic down-turn since the great depression; the recession of 1982. (That was the event that made America aware of the urban homeless.)

(I do not blame Volker for that. It was probably the right thing. But it's ironic that he's an Obama adviser.)

[demnan]

9. Yes I remember it

but in the D.C. area it probably wasn't as bad as in most places. I remember it as a time of relative prosperity with long gas lines. But I was still in school then and dependent on my parents.

My parents grew up during the Depression too. But in the D.C. area it wasn't as bad as some places, although there were poor people. My grandfather was a plumber, and everyone eventually needs a plumber, its not a job you can avoid, even if you don't have much money.

My grandfather took barter for payment from some people. An artist gave him a very nice oil painting that I have, probably is worth a lot of money.

[napi21]

10. I remember it. Gas shortages, you could only buy gas on alternate days,

and even THEN you had longs lines. Then there were the interest rates! Mtg. rates were at 13% and higher. Corporate lending rates reached 21%!!!! Jobs of any kind were almost nonexistant! My son was 16 yo and he tried everywhere to get a job. Even the fast food places weren't hiring!

However, if you HAD a job, and weren't buying a house, the main problem was getting gas for you car.

[melody]

11. Remember odd and even license plates? lol

That was loads of fun.

[whistle]

12. Oh yes, stagflation was the term, Nixon began price controls, Ford

...implemented austerity programs and Carter continued to push for balanced budgets. So from 1970 to 1978 inflation was strangling the country while wages went up a few percentage points at best. The prosperity which Reagan ushered in was all based on debt and then Bush Sr used the Gulf War to keep the debt spending high.

I must admit that the beginning of real prosperity the middle and lower class workers began with Clinton, but he should have kicked Greenspan out early in his administration and moved the country to a fiscal policy structure of needed long term infrastructure programs.

[LiberalHeart]

13. I prospered during that recession. No clue why. n/t

[NashVegas]

18. Did You Have Any Long-Term Loans?

Periods with high inflation benefit borrowers - as long as wages continue to rise, and in the late 1970s, income for the average American was still on the way up.

Say you bought a mortgage in 1975 with a payment of $400 per month while you're bringing home $1600. In 1980, you're still paying $400 for your house each month, but you're bringing home $2400.

Then Reagan gets elected, and you kiss it all goodbye unless you're shooting for an MBA, I suppose.

[riqster]

14. It would have been worse had it not been for Roosevelt/LBJ

...and the safety nets they put in place.

Said nets, of course, having been subsequently yanked away by the Reaganauts. No wonder it sucks even worse now.

[blondeatlast]

24. Exactly. I can't keep track with nccain and reagan; is he for or against him at 10:40 AZ time? nt

[willing dwarf]

15. At the time it seemed to just be a fact of life

I was in my childhood then, and it seemed like a mere fact of life that interest rates would be at about 15% (I remember everyone talking about it, but I didn't know what it meant.)

My father had his own business -- a small advertising agency --he had to borrow money at the commercial rate which was 20%, to pay for print and ad space in newspapers. Even when the people who hired him follow through, he was still left holding the bag for those horrible high rates. Somehow he kept paying it back, but it meant that there were weeks and months when he didn't draw a salary on his job. I have no idea how we made it through.

My mother went back to work when I was 12, which felt like it was way to early to me, but her salary,also writing advertising for Wanamakers, a big department store in Philadelphia, probably helped them keep afloat.

I know they were lucky because the mortgage on their house had been for $14,000 (1956 rates) so that wasn't a problem. But the cost of food kept rising, and the cost of gas. I remember when gas went up to $.45 and everyone got wildly upset and excited. I have no idea what the price was during the oil embargo, but I think it was about $.75 per gallon. Wouldn't that, along with a $14,000 mortgage be great today?

Above all, it just didn't seem like there were jobs anywhere. I remember in the 80's when "help wanted" signs started to appear in shop windows, I just was astounded. I couldn't figure out how it happened --until maybe 12 years later we began to see that deficit spending to increase the military had driven the economy -- but it was all a false positive, being predicated on debt.

[calico1]

16. I remember it.

I was a teen during most of the 70's (turned 20 in 1978).

My parents (especially my Mom) were careful with money. Both of them were blue collar workers. We didn't have a lot of luxuries but we had everything we needed.

I really don't recall anyone suffering too much during that time. Of course I was young so I wasn't paying as much attention as I am now.

I do remember my dad going out very early (before dawn) to go get in line for gas. That was about the worse inconvenience that I can remember and remember all the neighbors my parents age complaining about.

I also recall a lot of carpooling at that time.

ETA--I agree with you. I would much rather go through that again then have a total crash just for the sake of sticking it to Wall Street. That, imo would be a short lived satisfaction.

[cojoel]

17. I was a teenager

There were several factors involved:


In 1971 Nixon canceled the Bretton Woods System that had set the rules for convertibility between international currencies, and ended the direct convertibility from dollars to gold. There was already the groundwork of inflation in the currency that had not been leveled out in international markets, and it took years for this to stabilize (if you want to call it that). By 1976 all of the major world currencies were floating.

After a reduction of troop presence in Viet Nam and reduction of military operations, and eventually the final pull-out, there was a significant ramp down in defense contractor spending at the same time that more people hit the job market after being discharged from the armed services. This resulted in higher unemployment.

There was a general malaise over the country as the details of the Nixon administration crimes were revealed. This was the big news item, culminating with Nixon's resignation in 1974. This was probably more psychological than economic but it contributed to a general dour mood of the country.

So with inflation, high unemployment, and a generally bad mood the country was in a period of recession/slow growth for quite a while. The stock market really didn't sustain any increases during that time and the DJIA seemed stuck below 1000.

Some of the things I remember from that time were:
1) Gerald Ford's plan for economic recovery, which was wearing WIN buttons. WIN stood for "whip inflation now". But there were no real policies to end inflation.
2) In 1976 the minimum wage was increased to $2.20 / hour. Lots of (R) talk about that would ruin the economy. It is sad that at this point the minimum wage today isn't anywhere near that, in buying power.
3) The election of Jimmy Carter in 1976 brought some glimmer of hope, but the economic system didn't change much until Paul Volker was appointed as FED chairmen. The medicine of high interest rates was tough but eventually inflation was wrung out of the system. My first car loan had an interest rate of 17.6%. Of course, Reagan made sure his tax cuts in the early 1980s got the credit for ending inflation, even though that really started a massive deficit build-up that wasn't reversed until the Clinton Administration.

On a more humorous note, I remember a funny sketch from SNL parodying a speech Carter gave while he was suffering from hemorrhoids. The new economic plan in the sketch was titled "Preparation H".

[willing dwarf]

19. I remember those WIN buttons

What cringe moment they were. Seems like it was a real line in the sand between the old generation and the new. WIN buttons were a throw back to the "everybody in this together" approach to life, seemed like the start of the the post modern attitude. But that may just be my own deconstructionist view at work!

[eShirl]

20. energy crisis brought on by the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_energy_crisis

Meanwhile, the shock produced chaos in the West. In the United States, the retail price of a gallon of gasoline rose from a national average of 38.5 cents in May 1973 to 55.1 cents in June 1974. Meanwhile, New York Stock Exchange shares lost $97 billion in value in six weeks.

With the onset of the embargo, U.S. imports of oil from the Arab countries dropped from 1.2 million barrels (190,000 m³) per day to 19,000 barrels (3,000 m³). Daily consumption dropped by 6.1% from September to February, and by 7% during summer of 1974, as the United States suffered its first fuel shortage since the Second World War.

Underscoring the interdependence of the world societies and economies, oil-importing nations in the noncommunist industrial world saw sudden inflation and economic recession. In the industrialized countries, especially the United States, the crisis caused the most hardship to the unemployed, the marginalized social groups, certain categories of aging workers, and increasingly, by younger workers. Schools and offices in the U.S. often closed down to save on heating oil; and factories cut production and laid off workers. -snip-

[Maine-i-acs]

21. My Dad drafted plans for an earth-berm solar house -

I am trying to recreate them from memory now.

And us kids knew well enough not to touch that thermostat, or risk Dad's ire. We bought little dinky gas-sipping cars too. It all seems so familiar now because we're doing it all again!

[Ganja Ninja]

22. The first 3 years of the Reagan presidency were the worst.

They didn't happen until the early 80's. The 70's weren't great but they looked like the good times compared to Reagan's first term.

[eShirl]

23. I dunno, '73-74 were pretty scary to 10-year-old me

even scarier than Reagan

[Bucky]

25. Long gas lines, hard to find a job, factories closing down en masse

Not much fun in those days.

[noonwitch]

26. It wasn't that bad

My dad was buying a business at the time, but he had borrowed the cash from my grandpa and not a bank. Both my parents drove decent cars, we always had vacation money, and we lived in a nice house. Hell, we even built a pool in 1977, because my dad's business was thriving.

In the 80s, my dad did well, but there were a lot of homeless people in the big cities.