The Class of 2008
Business Daily
BBC
4.4 • 816 Ratings
🗓️ 14 September 2018
⏱️ 17 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
What happened to those who graduated straight into the worst financial and economic crisis since the Great Depression?
Kim Gittleson is one of them, and she goes in search of three others who - like her - found their career prospects straight out of university blighted by a disaster not of their making. Are they angry? Or did they actually learn some useful life lessons unique to their generation?
And how long a shadow has the grim milestone in financial history cast over their financial wellbeing and their ability to have families? Professor of sociology Kenneth Johnson of the University of New Hampshire and Lowell Ricketts of the St Louis Federal Reserve provide some of the answers.
(Picture: Students at a George Washington University graduation ceremonies in 2008. Credit: The Washington Post/Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello, I'm Kim Giddelson. Welcome to Business Daily from the BBC. Coming up, in 2008, more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. graduated from university and stepped right into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. |
| 0:18.7 | You know, there were people foreclosing left and right while I was graduating, and that was |
| 0:22.9 | really scary. |
| 0:23.6 | There was a sense of potential doom at all times. |
| 0:27.2 | I would go on so many interviews, and it would be the same thing, overqualified, underqualified. |
| 0:32.0 | I was one of them, and a decade on, I've been asking my fellow graduates and experts just |
| 0:36.8 | what the fallout was for my generation. |
| 0:39.2 | Some of those consequences might surprise you. |
| 0:41.5 | Had the birth patterns prior to the Great Recession continued, we would probably have about 4.8 million more births now than we do. |
| 0:51.1 | That's all in Business Daily from the BBC. |
| 1:04.3 | On a rainy June day, like thousands of other people, |
| 1:08.1 | I walked across a stage to the clashing symbols of pomp and circumstance and got my undergraduate degree, |
| 1:10.6 | blithely unaware of just what |
| 1:12.6 | was to come. |
| 1:19.9 | The Dow tumbled more than 500 points after two pillars of the street tumbled over the weekend. |
| 1:26.3 | Lehman Brothers, a 158-year-old firm, filed for bankruptcy. |
| 1:30.8 | I don't think anyone really expected a bank as big as Levin to be in a position that it's in now. |
| 1:36.1 | Like everyone else, I was caught off guard, especially because in a you can't make this sort of thing up moment, |
| 1:42.7 | this is who spoke to my graduating class during commencement. |
| 1:45.3 | And it is our honor and privilege to present to you today's keynote speaker, the Honorable Ben Espernaki. |
| 1:52.9 | Hello, Harvard. |
| 1:54.8 | If anyone knew what was to come, you would think it would have been the head of America's Central Bank. |
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