Tell me about "the 80's"

[cdmn]

If nothing else . Automotive manufactures started building HP back into the engines by the mid to late 1980’s . While improving fuel efficiency at the same time .

One thing good about the 80's was the introduction of the Buick with 3.8 engine. Still many around.

 

[farmer656]

What happened? In the late 1970s and early '80s I raised hogs on the side. As someone else said, banks went nuts with relaxed lending requirements. A loan officer at my bank gave me a stack of blank open notes and told me any time I needed money to fill one out for the amount and drop it in the night deposit box.

I kept it pretty well under control, but there were many farmers who were given the same privilege who didn't and overextended themselves. Interest rates soared to 12-15 percent. It all came to a head in the mid 1980s, and a lot of farmers didn't survive. Every weekend you could go to a foreclosure auction and buy farm machinery for 50 cents on the dollar or less.

By then, I owned an auto body shop and used car lot, and was farming a quarter section on the side.. The shop held its own, but I was paying 14 percent interest on my used vehicle inventory. You have to turn a vehicle over awful fast for a good margin to pay that kind of interest and still make a profit. In 1988 I just got tired of it all. A dry summer stunted my crops on the farm and an early killing frost got what the drouth didn't. I shut the shop and lot down, leased out the farm, and went to work for the local Ford dealer as a salesman. Two weeks later, I fell into being Service Manager through no effort on my part. Life went on.

That's a synopsis of my take on it.

I remember that era very well , I quit farming in 1982 , I was young and did not want to get debt and possibly loose everything, I Remember like yesterday that I was watching the national news one evening, they were interviewing a farmer from Iowa and in the back ground looked to be about 3 50000-bushel bins , , farmer told news caster. that if he had auction, sold all his grain sold the farm He would still be over a million in debt

 

[buickanddeere]

One thing good about the 80's was the introduction of the Buick with 3.8 engine. Still many around.

That same engine existed as a V8 in the early 1960’s . Tooling Was sold and then bought back by Buick in the 1970’s iirc .

 

[ss55]

12 percent interest, 12 percent inflation, 12 percent unemployment....at the same time. No jobs, everything got crazy expensive.... I was just starting farming, my Farm Credit loan was for 16 percent....but you had to prove you could cash flow it before they loaned you any money.

Ah, yes, the good old days...

Ben

Stag-Flation was a popular 1970s and 1980s term: Economic stagnation and high inflation at the same time.

Except for the farm economy, the rest of the country had tough times from the 1974 oil embargo until the late 1980s. The farm economy was booming for most of the 1970s until the 1980 grain embargo. The farm economy stayed tough until the ethanol mandate created a new market for excess corn production. Thirty years later 40 percent of US corn production is still used to produce ethanol.

 

[EFV]

If nothing else . Automotive manufactures started building HP back into the engines by the mid to late 1980’s . While improving fuel efficiency at the same time .

You've got that a little bass ackward. Mandated emission levels couldn't be met with old style(carbureted) fuel systems.
The common use of fuel injection improved emission levels and made power level increases possible.