In all countries in Eastern Europe, poverty is highest among children and youth. Young women and men are the hardest hit due to the privatisation of education, housing, and flexibilisation of labour markets. A new category of the working poor has emerged: those barely surviving and with no chance of accumulating savings for future pensions. This paper writes that in the European media, the financial crisis is no longer described as the crisis triggered by a speculative bubble, fictitious debt based financial products, or due to the deregulation of the financial sector. Critiques such as those by George Soros, who framed it as the crisis of financial capitalism, have faded away. Instead the responsibility has shifted to the people, who have been reconstituted as the major cause of the crisis.
This paper begins by making the point that the financial crisis is due to a short-sighted quest for profits, moreover it is a problem of speeding up the turnover of profits and the expansion of financial, debt-based markets, as well as an issue of corporate management, and government policies with far reaching implications for human lives. It concludes by arguing that as a result of the financial crisis, financial markets, bailed out banks and subsidised investors are doing well thanks to anti-crisis measures to strengthen investors and businesses at the expense of protecting households. Now the increased budget deficits and growth in public debt are treated as an excuse to continue neoliberal public sector reforms. Thus, it is not a crisis of the financial sectors, but rather a crisis of social reproduction, of people’s capacities to maintain theirs and their families’ lives. The author argues that markets can rebound quickly, but it takes a long time for households to recover, if they recover at all.