While it's quite likely that the peak of pilot recruiting for this cycle has been passed - and there is considerable evidence to support this - I'd be very wary of taking financial advice from pilots! Our record of economic analysis isn't the best. Not that bona fide financial analysts have a much better one, however, but most pilots' (or bus drivers' or teachers' or whomever else's) financial advice is based on gut feeling, anecdotes and insignificant statistics.
That said, here goes: the financial situation the UK and Europe finds itself in right now has few similarities with previous crises often used as circumstantial evidence for predictions of a recession/housing crash/stockmarket meltdown. While there is little doubt that confidence in and within the banking sector has taken a knock because of the lack of liquidity (ie free cash available for lending) as the major banks rein in their lending to the more risk-taking ('sub-prime') lenders, there are no signs of the wide-scale unemployment and high interest rates that have precipitated and exacerbated major national and international economic slowdowns in the past.
In the short term it will become a bit more expensive and a little more difficult to borrow money, both for corporate and individual customers. I would anticipate that, within six weeks or so, central bank interest rates in the US, UK and Europe will have eased and this will prick the bubble of interbank lending rates, with consequential easing of the consumer financial markets. Some of the less-salubrious financial institutions will undoubtedly fail - some already have - but the vast majority of the banking sector will be relatively untouched. Confidence will return, though perhaps not as quickly as some of you would like.
If you continually cry 'wolf', eventually you might be right - but no-one will believe you. I don't believe it now. That's not an excuse for irrational and reckless borrowing - you are responsible for your own financial health, and you will not be well-served by insolvency or major financial worries - but I suspect, as I have many times before, that this is a minor hiccup in a broadly very healthy economic period.
The property market discussion is not appropriate for these pages.
Scroggs