The crisis drives people in search of a better life
Every morning instead of a caloric breakfast we swallow a ton of crisis news, mostly 'black' – mass layoffs, salary cuts (on average by 25%), decline in overall living standards, increase in overdue loans (almost threefold), rise in crime – and so on and so forth in the same vein. The crisis news contradicts itself.
Some claim that the crisis has almost exhausted itself and that everything will normalize by the end of 2009. Others say that the global crisis has not reached us in full, that it is only beginning and the peak of the crisis in Russia will come in 2010-2011. A third group argues vehemently that the end of the crisis should only be expected by 2020. And so on ad infinitum. The only thing that cheers people up is fresh jokes on the crisis theme.
Russia faced the 2009 crisis more consciously than the news of the global crisis at the end of 2008. Indeed, all surrounding reality shows that the situation in the country could not be worse. Stock markets have suffered seriously due to the complex and unstable situation. Inflation is rampant across the country, devouring reserves – the gold and foreign currency funds. A severe decline in production, a banking system crisis manifested in the lack of lending and the closure of 'weak' banks, and so on.
A perfectly reasonable question arises – why did such a situation arise if we were living quite well recently? If the United States of America is to blame (after all, the crisis's roots are from there), then what does Russia have to do with it?
The causes of the 2008 crisis, in fact, are not only in America. Indeed, the United States of America, or more precisely, the difficult situation with mortgage lending, became the trigger that set off a chain reaction, which subsequently affected everyone.
But in reality, the situation that existed before was indeed very complex and deep; it involved directly the excess liquidity, the rise in prices for raw materials, the development of new financial instruments and many other things. And Russia – with its already confused and difficult situation, abundance of problems (political and economic) – became the most fertile ground for the global crisis to run wild.