Quote:
Originally Posted by KC911
John I wasn't really paying close attention back in '83, but inflation was still not dead yet, job market was horrible, and I seem to recall a "double dip" back then too....
....and life was good  |
I was graduating from law school in ‘83 with a huge stack of rejection letters from every job I had applied for. Jobs were not easy to find at all, even graduating from a top 10 law school (UCLA). It didn’t help that my summer internship had been with NORML. The only reason I got a job was my college roommate’s dad was a partner in a San Francisco firm, and he got the firm to give me a chance.
I was personally unaffected by the 1990 recession (and didn’t notice any bear market), but practically every junior associate in my firm who was doing real estate law lost their job or had to switch to some other kind of law. By the middle of the decade, a fifth year real estate associate was worth his weight in gold because there were so few.
In the 2000 bear market and recession, analysts all around me were getting laid off, in the gentle Wall Street manner wherein a security guard walks unannounced into your office, takes your keycard, and escorts you out of the building immediately, you come back on the weekend under guard to retrieve your personal stuff. Of 9 guys in my group, only 2 of us survived. Most of the others never got back into the industry - careers over for good.
The 2008 bear market and recession were gruesome. Five of us had started a fund, we lost 50% of the seed money in 2007 and 2008 (we weren’t idiots - it was a US small cap growth product with maximum 5% cash allowed, so there was nowhere to hide), lots of guys I knew got blown out and most of them never got back into the industry. That bear market went on and on, the financial system almost did blow up, consultants would come visit us and tease “you guys are still here?”. We hung on, nailed the bottom in March 2009, flipped the whole portfolio to the most aggressive names we could find (F at $1, etc) and were up +100% that year.
2020’s bear market and recession could have been the end of my career, not to mention the start of a global Depression. I went out on my own on Feb 4, 2020 - and the following week I was reading about air quality and crematories in Wuhan, buying up masks and respirators, and watching the market do what it did. But things worked out just fine.
I’m looking at the coming recession or not-quite recession, with my money still being on the former, with interest. None of us can say we’ve seen exactly this movie before, but after you’ve been around the sun enough, the movies start being sequels.