Monday 21 September 2009

Pulling up the drawbridge

mm...

A thought provoking post on BBC's business editor Robert Peston's blog today.

The bit that caught my eye - in the light of the fact that I still have a school age child:

"More by luck than desert, the generation of Lambert, Balls, Laidlaw and even Peston have had it pretty good.

We had free university education.

We have saved for a pension over the many years of a bull market and when companies and the public sector felt obliged to offer gold-standard final salary pension schemes.

We managed to get on the property ladder before house prices became ludicrously inflated.

And guess what? It was our generation which royally messed up the economy with the inadequate governance that led to the credit crunch and the worst global recession since the 1930s.

We're - on the whole - alright Jack, thanks to the accident of when we happen to have been born.

But those leaving school and university today face an altogether bleaker future: a drought of jobs; a bewildering and unappealing set of options for saving and investing; over-priced residential property (even after the "correction"); relentless fearsome competition from India, China, and so on."

The post follows on from suggestions regarding cuts to schools budgets and proposals for students to pay higher tuition fees.

1 comment:

  1. Good point APT sec, too many heads in the sand on this. Everyone is playing the business as usual game.

    ReplyDelete