Firms and Consumers in the Financial Crisis - Effects, Reactions, and Outlooks

In order to shed light on the consequences of the ongoing financial crisis, ETLA conducted two surveys at the end of October 2008. The firm survey targeted firms employing at least 10 persons in Finland (2,017 observations with a response rate of 33%) and the consumer survey targeted 1574-year-old Finns (2,025 observations with a response rate of 37%). More than half of the firms say that their sales/orders are down due to the financial crisis. In virtually all dimensions manufacturing fares worse than services. In part this is due to the fact that business-to-business and foreign markets seem to be experiencing more problems than consumer and domestic markets. If the situation continues, the problems will undoubt-edly spread. Our observations suggest that in the Finnish case the demand-induced effects will be more several than those directly attributable to problems in attracting external finance. Unless the October 2008 deepening in the crisis, which is now felt by all firms and consumers, is reversed shortly, the effects will accumulate and lead to a recession.