- Billions in rent paid to older generations every year with no hope of buying a house
- Earning less than the previous 2 generations were at this age. Less assets than the previous 2 generations had at this age.
The crux of the article is that another recession will drag these issues into Millennials' middle age, effectively destroying the American dream for a whole generation. If the next recession is large enough, I can believe that premise.
The great recession is so named because it is supposed to be much worse than your average recession - a one-in-a-hundred-years recession. It makes sense considering how the financial system leveraged itself on toxic assets.
The question is, how confident can we be that we won't have two horrific recessions in a row? At face value the concept of a "one in a hundred years" recession seems to imply that this won't happen. But as an individual I wouldn't say I'm particularly confident that the market is sane.
Interest rates are going down to join the rest of the world in negative interest rates, despite the states supposedly being in an expansion. Shiller PE ratios suggest stocks are overpriced similar to pre-recession and pre-depression highs. The latest batch of IPOs seems full of companies that are not profitable and may never be profitable and yet your average investor is now exposed (through e.g. their index funds). A seemingly infinite pool of capital with nowhere to go props up wildly questionable companies like WeWork. Real estate values in top cities have blasted off into outer space as this infinite pool of capital looks for more places to park cash.
Maybe we can add in more ordinary concerns too, like average citizen's debt rising, corporate debt rising, sovereign debt rising, etc
It's quite possible that the next recession will be of the ordinary variety, but it's not impossible we will end up with Great Depression 2.0 at some point. If I were a fiction writer imagining the setup to a next great depression, I imagine it would look similar to the world today.
We are still bearing the consequences of the big bail out, forcefully paid by most of us instead of allowing some events to follow their natural path and the chance that things eventually balanced out. The artificiality of that solution has created abnormal behaviors and conditions such as the access to cheap money and a double standard for financial instruments, like personal vs institutional debt. Those situations effectively devalue money and allow arrangements that are very paradoxical from an economic standpoint as you pointed out.
As it has been mentioned in other comments here, I don't think this is limited to Millennials. Just by looking at the diversity of the economic statistics per state in the US you can see it is a more generalized problem. I would not consider that a complete "economy" has recovered from a recession when the numbers tell us we have just delayed aftermaths and major factions of it are still underwater with very bad prognosis.
No seriously, if the market crashes, what would we lose? We have no assets that would be devalued. We have shitty jobs so we don't really care if we lose those, we can pick them back up pretty easily. I don't need a car if I don't have a job, so you can take that too. I'm used to eating like a peasant from going through university, so no worries there either.
The only thing I would be upset about losing would be the internet, as that's where most of my "assets" lie (subscribers, digital assets like in-game currencies, items or characters, etc.)