Worldwide Financial Crisis Politics and governments

Hi! Worldwide Financial Crisis began in 2008 and it still exists (or not?) in different parts of the world. Our medias are very often lying about situation in different countries. Please write if you have observed crisis in your country, have it affected you or your relatives/friends, and what is the social opinion about the situation in your country?

I'd begin with Poland:
In worldwide medias there exist an opinion that Poland is facing the crisis really well. It's not true. I can't deny that Poland is the only country in UE not to fall into recession since the begining of the crisis but now we are facing really difficult situation. Unemployment rose to 14,4 %, many people work with contracts with no social cover and lots of young people leave country to go to the United Kingdom, Ireland, Germany or the Netherlands. It's been already 3 million people since 2004 (the year of Polish entry to the UE) so if they stayed in Poland it would be about 25% of unemployment. Moreover we have embarassingly low fertility rate, people don't want to have children and schools must be closed(there's no job for professors) and the society is ageing rapidly. Problems are growing, and if yet we haven't had the situation like Spain or Italy, I think we are unfortunately following the same way.

That's a bad situation. I'm currently living with this crisis here in Italy, and among my friends or their parents, I'm just seeing people that lose their job, or just want to live abroad right away. Students or young people can't find a job anywhere, they just keep searching, or studying to go away, but it's been hard even studying. Without money, it's pretty difficult to enter in a university far from your house, we ALL are just talking about "living away" from Italy, while seeing our "adorable" politicians with a bunch of money that belong to US citizens. What it's happening here, it is also a bit difficult. We're changing our government, and after the polling stations, they came up dysfunctions, beacause these politicians (oh my god, I can't believe that I'm saying that even Berlusconi is up there!!) have different ideas from each other. We're waiting to see how they will work, and who will make a coalition with someone to come to the Senate, but I don't trust our government anymore, just like I can't believe that there are people here that still don't know who to vote for.

The situation in Germany is strange, in a way: While the European states all around us beg for money, change their unemployment rates daily or even discuss to leave the Euro-Zone, Germany seems to have no problems at all, our employment rates haven't been that well for decades. Although I would never vote for Angela Merkel and her party (I can't take them seriously as long as they still think there would be a difference between heterosexual and homosexual marriages), I have to admit that she did a perfect job by protecting us.
Nevertheless, many Germans are angry that we have to pay for our neighbors, especially the Greeks because many argue that the problems have long been known before, but they - all Greek politicians - did not even try to face them. Furthermore, people argue that it was impossible to have such low tax revenues by so many millionaires. Maybe it is a question of mentality, I don't know, but I can say that we Germans pay our taxes voluntarily (more or less, of course 😃); especially richer people wonder why they can't pay more to support those having less.
But we face different problems, independent from the crisis: We have more free jobs than people to work in. The birthrate is decreasing (only the "underachievers" still have babies). People turn older and older. The government saves money, especially education sufferes from this.
I wish that the crisis ends. I'm fed up to see protesters saying it was Germany's fault. I feel sorry for the suffering people, but I promise that it was never our mistake! If the crisis ends, the European states may become a big family. Hopefully!

The fault was complicated, Germans have their part too, but it's fine to hear that situation in Germany is good, because Poland has big economical ties with your country. If you have money, we sell you our products, if you don't have them we don't sell them, and so we don't produce them, and factories close etc. It works like this.

I'm still quite young and I don't know if there really is a problem of unemployment and recession or is this just a product of capitalism and these problems are always present. The American unemployment rate is only about 8% right now, but it means nothing to be honest. Those with degrees that are in demand will most likely get a job and those without a degree or useless degrees will have a hard time getting a job. However, the media has always been pessimistic about the outlook of the country and so the fear of recession is always in people's minds.

Still, there are lots of declining cities in America despite a strong performance recently. The most notable example is Detroit, which is the automotive capital of America. Detroit has a high crime rate as well as unemployment rate and its population has declined by 25% since 2000. The simple reason is the collapse of the car industry in around 2008. Detroit will never recover, as well as other industrious towns in America.

I believe the problem of recession is not due to the decrease in the production of goods, but rather the shift in the way goods are made. It is now cheaper to have goods made in China, India or some developing countries and so people have been losing their jobs due to this. When there are no jobs, people obviously complain and the numbers show up, but at the same time, people start to go in a different directions. The hottest products that are coming out aren't things like plates or clothes or spoons but they're electronics like iPad or smartphones so there are now huge demands for computer science students. In the next ten years you'll very likely see a decline in unemployment rate when our lifestyles become more integrated into this virtual world. The virtual world is created by humans only and so the need for labor won't really disappear, unlike factories where they're replacing hands with robots.