Lost generation? 2008 crisis still weighs on millennials
NEW YORK: Marco Saavedra had just graduated from college in 2011 three years after the global financial crisis erupted and just as the Occupy Wall Street movement was picking up steam.
Like many in his generation, Saavedra faced slim pickings for jobs after college, a fate that has left millennials with a wealth gap that economists fear they won’t ever recover.
It has also left them more skeptical about government, worried about the future and more activist.
Saavedra, 28, who is undocumented, joined the Occupy chapter in Ohio, and now works at his family’s restaurant in the Bronx in New York City, where he is active in immigrant rights campaigns.
Laura Banks, 31, never had any interest in demonstrating, but also has bad memories from her early 20s of going to job fairs where there were almost no jobs. Friends lost jobs and her father, an attorney, had trouble finding clients.
“We felt very cornered. We feel like we’re behind,” said Banks, who now works as a project manager for Express Scripts in St. Louis.
She married last year but has doubts about having kids, in part due to fear of another financial crash.
Saavedra and Banks are part of the millennial generation, which includes people born between 1980 and 1996, now the biggest cohort in the United States, a status that makes marketers salivate.
But the group also is burdened by high student debt loads, that with the scarcity of jobs during the Great Recession has resulted in lengthy post-collegiate sojourns in their parents’ homes and lingering doubts about the future.
The group is at risk of becoming a “lost generation,” the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis warned in a report in May that tracked how the cohort’s wealth accumulation lagged historical norms for people in their 20s and 30s.
Although it spared no generation, the 2008 financial meltdown was more calamitous for young adults because there was no way to recoup the debt they took on for education, cars and credit cards.
“Because none of these types of debt finance assets that have appreciated rapidly during the last few years – such as stocks and real estate – they received no leveraged wealth boost like that enjoyed by the older cohorts,” the report said.
Crushing student debt was among the rallying cries of Occupy Wall Street, a movement led largely by young adults who blamed the crisis on corporate greed and a rigged system that benefited the ‘one per cent’ at the expense of everyone else.
The group gained its greatest visibility during the almost-two month occupation of Zuccotti Park in lower Manhattan before police evicted activists and removed tents in November 2011.
Although much more low profile today, Occupy Wall Street still has a presence on Twitter, where it touts progressive environmental policies, criticizes gentrification and lambasts President Donald Trump over immigration and other issues.