Monologue: Crisis situation, three different pictures where you can see people seeking employment and so on.

Good afternoon. I've been asked to talk about the economic crisis with three images which represent it.

In the three images we can see  the consequences of the economic crisis: people looking for a job, poverty and so on.

In Spain we are suffering a deeper crisis that in other countries because we added to the world crisis the problem of the bubble in the housing prices. The process went something like this:

- The house prices increased at an incredible rate. Thinking that this situation would go on in the future the people asked for bigger mortgages to the banks.

- The banks should have evaluated better the financial situation of the people who asked them for loans because they lent people more money that they couldn't afford to pay back.

- Eventually when crisis came, people lost their job and thereby they couldn't meet  the  mortgage payments.

- This led to failure of the banks and they stopped to lend. That provoked the failure of many businesses, more people were fired and as a consequence the crisis worsened, and back again.

As a result of this process, there has been an impressive amount of people without work, the poverty has raised a lot and public services as education and health care have deteriorated a lot.

Providing a solution for these issues is really difficult because just when crisis appears, government and society have no money. That doesn't have to defeat us, on the contrary, we have to fight more to help people who are suffering.

From my point of view, some things that could be done are:

- Government should help with money to people who have lost all the subsidies. They could increase taxes to rich people and then using the money to help these people.
- Increasing the money invested in education and health care to prevent deterioration of these services. To do that, government should reduce unnecessary expenses in other areas.
- Improving conditions for people to set up new businesses.
- Cutting down taxes to put money in the hands of people and so help companies because people could buy things produced by them.

To conclude, I would like to say that citizens as us, could also contribute to the solution, for instance giving our time and money to ngos which help people with bad situation.