The credit crunch isn't bad news for everybody......
We've all been so busy fixating on the agony the credit crunch is going to inflict that it's easy to forget it will create its fair share of winners as well.
This strange truth occurred to me after I saw a new piece of research from the Fair Investment Company suggesting that a quarter of Britons have absolutely no money worries this Christmas, despite rising job losses and living costs.
They can keep lavishing each other with frivolous gifts just like they did in those freewheeling pre-crunch days and still have money left over to turn on the central heating, the lucky swines.
While the credit crunch has been hammering a wide range of folk from over-leveraged Russian oligarchs to Woolworth's floor staff, most people have survived the near collapse of the global banking system relatively unscathed. So far.
And if - admittedly a big if - you can hang onto your job in 2009, several economic winds are blowing in your favour.
Some you win
First, if you have a mortgage, or to be more precise, a tracker or variable rate mortgage, your monthly payment may shrink rapidly now that base rates have fallen to 2%, with further cuts to come.
If you drive a car, filling up is going to cost a lot less with a barrel of Brent Crude closer to $40 than $140. And with new and used car sales plummeting, you could also pick up a new motor on the cheap.
First-time buyers, or anybody excluded from the recent property market bonanza, may feel quiet satisfaction at predictions that prices will drop another 10-15% next year. Even if you just want to upsize to a large house you could benefit, provided you can shift your existing shack.
In fact, anybody who buys stuff, like food or clothes, should also save money in 2009, as retailers discount and discount to win business. So it's not all gloom and gloom.
Some you lose
With the economy set to shrink by 1.7% in 2009, according to the CBI, the rollcall of losers will be tragically long. More than one million people long, in fact, with the CBI expecting unemployment to soar from 1.8 million to 2.9 million by 2010.
Pensioners, savers and anybody who can't keep up with their debt repayments are also set for a dreadful time. There will be plenty more who lose out.
Repo men
The credit crunch, like most man-made disasters, will strike randomly and unevenly.
One man's collapsing house value is another's property bargain. This brutal equation is most clearly demonstrated at a house price auction, where lenders flog off all those repossessed hopes and dreams to private landlords and property developers. Morality doesn't come into it.
I vividly recall the recession of the early 1990s, particularly 16 September 1992, Black Wednesday, when the Conservative government was forced to withdraw from the ERM and interest rates briefly shaved 15%.
At the time I was working for a medical newspaper, which was funded by adverts from drug companies. Sales of pharmaceuticals rise in a recession, as did our pagination. I kept my job, got promoted, and bought my first flat a few years later, shortly before the house price boom started.
I was a winner then, but as a personal finance freelancer I don't expect to be so lucky this time.
Chaffing nonsense
Now is a good time to be working for your local council, a utility company, or as a debt collector. It's a bad time to be working for a car dealership, estate agency or charity (donations are falling).
Which of the above deserve to thrive? I'll leave that for you to decide. But I can't agree with people who claim recessions are a good thing, capitalism's way of sorting out the wheat from the chaff. I see little method to the recessionary madness.
Economic downturns thrash about wildly in every direction, hacking down deserving and undeserving alike.
It even works on a national level. Germany, in contrast to Britain, sensibly kept incomes low, personal debt to a minimum and exports enviably high, but its economy is contracting even faster than ours.
So, don't be too smug, the winners among you. Just count your blessings (quietly, please, plenty of people will be suffering). And prepare yourself for the next swing of fortune's wheel, in particular by clearing your debts, in case desperate central bank efforts to defeat deflation spark hyper-inflation, and interest rates go through the roof.
And losers, hang on in there, losing your job isn't a judgement on your soul (although at times it might feel like it).
Don't feel angry at the lucky one in four Britons who can afford to spend freely this Christmas (unless they're bankers). Just hope they continue to do so in 2009. The fate of the UK's economy rests in their hands.
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