I think the public for borrowing, the banks for lending and the government for turning a blind eye can all be apportioned blame fairly evenly. The public have the defence of being a bit thick, the other two do not.
The Machiavellian side of me think that in both the US and UK the government of the day calculated a change of administration was likely and thus the bursting bubble would be the-other-lots problem so they let the bubble grow. I wouldn't fancy George Osbornes job of sorting out the public finances of 2010 - 2015. Would you?
It is possible to celebrate rather than lament the US/UK/Wests prediliction for boom and bust. Creative Destruction is real. Hosing money around does ensure that some is sprinkled on wacky but worthy new businesses. Google probably wouldn't have got going were it not for the promise of millionaire making stock options prevalent during the tech bubble.
Whatever. We are where we are and the graph I posted above shows that we are somewhere we haven't quite been before. There has never ever ever been a credit and asset price bubble like we have spent the last decade living through. Its new. Its new in both scale and in breadth. If we are to return to historical norms we will have to have GDP shrinkage of around 6% per year for 2 years and then stagnation/low growth for a decade.
That would be deeply horrible. Perhaps it won't happen. I suspect it will though.
If you look at the the CAA statistics there were 1146 new CPL's issued in the year to August 2007 (over a year out of date I know). That is the sort of scale of competition that the Wannabe is up against. Plus redundancies. Plus foreigners who speak English and hold JAA licenses.
The figures for Professional License Issues and Renewals per year shows:
Year
-----
06-07 5384
05-06 5362
04-05 3434
03-04 2775
The statistics are not detailed nor consistent enough to draw definitive conclusions. Nevertheless it looks very much as if the last 3 years has seen a tidal wave of people going through the training system. Were this to fall back to 03-04 levels then the flying training industry is going to shrink by close to half.
Be careful out there and unless you are a window licking loon DO NOT borrow vast sums of money to fund training unless bankruptcy suits your circumstances.
Which is very well might.
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