Ed. – Attention given lately to the tenth anniversary of the Great Recession of 2008 provoked this opinion piece by a millennial which gives a more personal side to the challenges this generation faces. One does not have to totally agree to glean some valuable insight here.

I Came of Age During the 2008 Financial Crisis. I’m Still Angry About It.

By M.H. Miller
New York Times
September 15, 2018

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, in a house near a dead end, which my parents bought in 1992. They paid for it with a conventional mortgage that they had the misfortune of refinancing in January 2008.

A series of disasters followed, all of which would have been previously unthinkable. Within a matter of months, investment banks like Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers collapsed from having taken on too much risk, predominantly in the housing market, and by the fall of that year both of my parents had lost their jobs. In the brief interim between their refinancing and the global economic meltdown, the value of the house plummeted, so my parents owed more on their mortgage than what the property was worth.

At this time, I was a senior at New York University, one of the country’s most expensive private institutions and one of the reasons my parents, who, like so much of the middle class, had no real asset of value aside from their house, decided to refinance the mortgage in the first place. My parents and I always imagined we’d find a way to pay for my college, through some clever combination of savings and scholarships – and, if all else failed, through one of the easily available high-interest student loans offered by major banks. All of this seemed practical enough, or at the very least as if it could be worried about later: My parents – again, like so much of the middle class – believed that any variety of worst-case scenarios didn’t happen to people like them.

I return to this scene often, even 10 years later. The financial crisis remains the defining trauma of my generation, many members of which, like me, had just graduated from college or were preparing to in 2008. In the years since, the suffering from the financial crisis has become the connective tissue of a demographic routinely denounced as lazy and spoiled.

These generational traits die hard, but so does the rejiggering of America’s class system in the last decade: Median household income has only recently rebounded to its prerecession levels, though income growth has generally stalled; homeownership rates have fallen; and consumer debt from credit cards and student loans has steadily risen, widening the gap between the wealthy and the destitute, and leaving a long-suffering demographic somewhere in the embattled middle.

One of the stranger legacies of the crash is that young Americans have shouldered the blame for the country’s slow recovery. Elected officials and other architects of the recession are more likely to dismiss people struggling to find their way in a time of depleted opportunity as “sanctimonious, sensitive, supercilious snowflakes,” to borrow a phrase from United States Attorney General Jeff Sessions, speaking at an event for conservative high school students in July, than to recognize their own culpability.

And so housing reports, sociological studies and the news media have blamed grim statistics, like the shrunken class of American homeowners, on an “entitled” millennial lifestyle, in the process producing some of the most laughable pseudoscience in recent history.

A “sobering” report from the real estate website Zillow attempted to explain that the reason millennials rent instead of buy is because they spend money on lavish bachelor or bachelorette parties instead of saving. But this generation, quite simply, can’t afford homes. Our stagnant incomes must go toward the loans we took out for college in the misguided belief that a higher education would lead to a down payment on a house, affordable health care and other relics that once defined our parents’ generation.

Many people have and will continue to condemn me personally for my tremendous but unexceptional student debt, and the ways in which it has made the recession’s effects linger for my family. I’ve spent quite a lot of time in the past decade accepting this blame. The recession may have compounded my family’s economic insecurity, but I also made the conscious decision to take out loans for a college I couldn’t afford in order to become a journalist, a profession with minimal financial returns. The amount of debt I owe in student loans – about $100,000 – is more than I make in a given year. I am ashamed and embarrassed by this, but as I grow older, I think it is time that those profiting from this country’s broken economic system share some of my guilt.

Because of the loans’ disgracefully high interest rates, my family and I have paid more or less the equivalent of my debt itself in the years since I graduated, making monthly payments in good faith – even in times of unemployment and extreme duress – to lenders like Citigroup, a bank that was among the largest recipients of federal bailout money in 2008 and that eventually sold off my debt to other lenders. This ruinous struggle has been essentially meaningless: I now owe more than what I started out owing, not unlike my parents with their mortgage.

For so many people, the frustration over the recession has not receded – it’s only been replaced by the fear of a more immediately upsetting present, though much of the country’s current situation can be traced back to the unresolved anger of 2008. Still, our culture is now being forced to reckon with a level of near nostalgia for the crisis, as if its misery has passed, ignoring the fact that so many families routed by the recession, like my own, have for the most part not recovered, at least not fully. In an interview in August, Barney Frank, the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee and a co-sponsor of the Dodd-Frank Act, which revised financial regulations after the crisis, looked back almost wistfully on his regrets from that time. Mr. Frank, who is now on the board of Signature Bank, put it plainly: “We did not do enough to help stave off foreclosure for some of the innocent victims of all this.”

It’s an awfully nice thought, but I wonder where this realization was 10 years ago, when it would have meant something. Being forced to witness this halfhearted apology tour among high-ranking officials is another prominent feature of having grown up during the crisis, one that brings me back to a different scene from 2009, which I tend to revisit a great deal.

My parents, as predicted, did not find new jobs in Michigan, and they attended my N.Y.U. commencement ceremony on May 13, 2009, with a looming foreclosure and, for the first time since before I was born, no idea what would come next. The commencement speaker was Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. She described the “extraordinary moment in history” in which all of us were receiving our degrees, a vague allusion to the country’s struggles at the time, many of which have only become worse in the intervening years: a simmering populist rage that threatened to cleave the country in two; a broken shadow banking system operating without regulatory oversight; a crowd of young voters in front of her who would be entering a bleak job market with an average debt of five figures a person and little hope of paying it off.

Mrs. Clinton then echoed a fantasy of boundless opportunity that had helped guide the country into economic collapse, deceiving many of the parents in attendance, including my own, into borrowing toward a future that they couldn’t work hard enough to afford. “There is no problem we face here in America or around the world that will not yield to human effort,” she said. “Our challenges are ones that summon the best of us, and we will make the world better tomorrow than it is today.” At the time, I wondered if this was accurate. I now know how wrong she was.