I'm kinda new into economy crashes, was a kid in 2008, is there a way to protect of it?

I’ve been through several recessions.

Painfully I’ve learnt that you want to work in an industry that is largely recession proof.

Focus on industries that sell things that people need and will try to keep buying right down to their last buck.

Food, utilities, insurance. People don’t like sitting in the dark. People need water. People need to eat. People really don’t like living without insurance cover or to let cover lapse.

They don’t need Netflix, Disney+ or Prime. They don’t need Spotify. They don’t need training or e-learning. They don’t need luxury goods. They don’t need new motor vehicles. They don’t need holidays. They don’t need new iPhones or new computers.

Try and move now to an industry that has some security.

Investment wise diversification is key. Just pray that it doesn’t get so bad that banks start to fail.

Live like you're already poor, reduce all unnecessary spending, adopt an ascetic mindset to support this lifestyle. That way, when a collapse comes you'll be accustomed to living frugally already and you'll have all the money you saved by getting a head start already saved up to get you through rough patches with relative ease.

Now, when I say live like you're poor, I mean do it smart. Don't grocery shop at a gas station, do your necessary purchases in bulk (actually poor people can't or won't, but would be better off if they could.). Don't but the cheapest boots, but rather the best value. But when choosing how many vacations to take, maybe pick camping locally more often than exotic vacations. Eat simple foods, don't order out fancy stuff and get accustomed to such luxuries. Don't automatically buy the latest consumer toy just because it looks fun. Don't move into a nicer apartment just because you got a raise. You get the idea.

I (like I'm sure many others) predicted it in 2007 and hedged against it by getting a 10 year fixed mortgage at then-current rates on the basis that rates would go sky high as they had in earlier recessions in the UK.

They plummeted to next-to-zero, and in addition to the injury I had to endure the insult of the people who hadn't seen it coming gloating about their low standard variable rates.

Ofc I clearly didn't have much real economic understanding but I guess I am saying that beyond normal common financial sense (the lack of which at scale leads to these situations) which you should be using anyway, we don't really know which way the wind is blowing, and what the exact consequences will be.

Skill. Knowledge. At your age, your biggest assert is your future earnings potential. The more employable you are, the better you will make iduring and after a downturn. In fact, the highest skill folks tend to even profit from hiccups in the economy.

Nothing provides complete protection, but diversification can help reduce the impact.

The person saying gold and mining stocks may or may not be correct - it's still a risky position. Precious metals could be in a commodity bubble right now (or not). It's had to predict anything with perfect accuracy, which is why diversification matters.

You probably shouldn't be jumping completely in or out of anything because that requires timing, which is also not easy to do. What you can do is change he weights withing your portfolio. For example, reducing your US equity exposure to increase your bond exposure. Or reducing your US growth exposure to increase your US value and Eurozone dividend exposure. It's best to listen to several financial companies reports to weigh what to do.

Your life should have a plan beyond tomorrow or the next hype cycle so that you progress towards your goals independently of the flow of society. This will allow you to navigate those flows instead.

The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks

Assets traditionally used for such hedge are already massively inflated (look gold an silver price charts), so I'm not sure it's worth it.

This all depends on what timelines you work on, how many assets you are trying to protect.

Alternatively you protect yourself by lowering your dependence on steady income.

It's difficult to draw many lessons from 2008. The people who suffered most then were over extended home owners. It's still not a good idea to be one of those people but there aren't so many of them now anyway.

Maximize income and cash flow, when things start to crash, you want to have fresh new money coming in to start buying undervalued oversold assets.

In the meantime, keep investing to avoid eroding the value of your money as the dollar drops in value. It also prepares you for the possibility the crash doesn’t occur for a very long time, long enough to grow your net worth substantially to be better insulated.

Yes, you either marry into extreme wealth or hope that luck doesn't strike you into generational poverty. Anyone saying anything different is lying too you.

There's a common consensus in economics that bubbles are really hard to predict, and even some argument that they don't actually really exist. Great paper came out recently called "Bubbled for Farma"[0] which looks at predictability for bubbles and finds some indicators but no sure fire thing.

That sort of rules out an easy or known way to predict and avoid bubbles. That said, it's worth noting our current historic period marked by being post financialisation (taking out a bunch of investment regulation) of markets in the 80s exhibits a lot more economic crashes (the real reason we should car about bubbles) than most of history (although most of history also does not exhibit any economic growth, so be careful what you wish for).

In particular, the period between around 1930-1975 showed extremely high growth with almost no bubbles or market crashes[1].

So my semi-knowledgeable but definitely not expert view is that: - Bubbles and crashes are not easy to predict, and therefore avoid - That said, our existing market rules have effects on the number of crashes/bubbles we see (but there's debate around whether you actually would want an economy with less crashes/bubbles if that meant left growth)

[0] https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Bubbles%20for%20...

[1] You can find this discussed a bunch of places but Ha-Joon Chang's Economics: The User's Guide talks about this very fluently.

Edit: I think your question might actually have just been about personal protection again bubbles, rather than protecting the economy as a whole. In which case, having margin in your spending so you'd be able to live if things were some portion more expensive against your earnings is probably the only sane suggestion.

Gold and silver mining stocks. And International ETF funds. It looks like the United States will be going through the depression alone.