Tyrll Adolf B.

Itong
Comm 3 MTh 1:00 2:30
Prof. Bartolo

I.
II.

III.

Type of Speech:
Informative
Event:
Forum

Speech

Does anybody here or somebody in your family have lost their jobs recently?
Does anybody of you here has experienced having no allowance for days, the reason
being your parents do not even have the money to feed themselves? These are very
startling questions, but somewhere in the world, people are going through these
situations, and almost all of them will blame it to the global economic recession that is
happening right now. Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon.
What is a recession? In economics, a recession is a business cycle contraction,
a general slowdown in economic activity over a period of time. We had the Great
Depression; a recession that happened because of several factors, important was the
Wall Street Crash of 1929. This eventually led to unemployment and in turn, became the
spark for the two world wars that subsequently occurred. Another recent recession was
the 1997 Asian financial crisis, a crisis that severely wrecked Asian economies,
particularly the stock markets and export goods. The crisis had brutally hampered the
strong growth of these economies, destroying years of efforts into rubble. Today,

though, we now face a new recession, one that is of a different strain than the two
previous recessions I have discussed. This is because of the fact that this recession is a
global recession, an economic crisis that has stretched from East to West. Even until
now, we can still feel the effects of these recessions, particularly the most recent global
economic recession. It has affected much of our social and even our political aspects,
much as it has affected our economics.
One of these social implications of the global recession is the decrease of
individual spending. And I am very sure that most of the people in this room have gone
through. The fact that people are now becoming thrifty and tightening their belts, so to
speak, is a clear implication of the recession. Before, Filipinos were spending their
money like it was a mere stone, identical to thousands of other stones. But with the
global recession, Filipinos, and even other nationalities, are already doing the opposite;
trying to save every peso they can, with the new thinking that money is now more
valuable than a piece of stone.
Another implication of this recession we are in is the overhaul of the social strata.
Middle-class families are now experiencing something unusual, that is, they are forced
to go down to a lower class or even to the lowest class. They are compelled to sell their
hard-earned properties and go down to live in shacks. This leads to the increase of the
families who are below or just above the poverty line.
A concrete repercussion of the global recession, in the political side, is the
obvious changes in the bureaucracy of several countries. Governments around the
world have begun to restructure their economies, reorganize departments, and cut their
spending and budget deficits by a considerable fraction. The United States of America,

one of the countries severely hit by the crisis, have started their own efforts in
revitalizing their economies. They are now buying out bankrupt companies like General
Motors and Goldman Sachs and encouraging individuals to engage in small-time
entrepreneurship.
Another political consequence of this depression is the political instability in many
countries around the world. Civil unrests, riots, and protests ignited as workers complain
the loss of their jobs, their homes and their future. Greeks took part in a massive
general strike and shut down schools, airports, and many other services in Greece. In
January 2009, the government of Iceland was forced to call elections two years early
after the people of Iceland staged mass protests and clashed with the police due to the
government's mishandling of the nation.
But it is not the end of the world, my friends. We do have a light of hope. History
has shown us time and time again that recessions happen do every now and then, and
it often takes place in times that we do not expect it to. And people have always held
others responsible for their own hardships. Let me end by quoting the words of George
Bernard Shaw, People are always blaming their circumstances for what they are. I
don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who
get up and look for the circumstances they want, and, if they can't find them, make
them. Indeed, what we must do is to ride this recession out and persevere. Someday,
this recession might just be a part of history.