Name: 10 Worst Decisions From the 1980s
Uploaded: 2025-02-21T10:55:21.000Z
Duration: 14 min 10 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

My fellow Americans, I've spoken to you from this historic office on many occasions and about many things.

Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at disastrous political and economic choices from the 1980s that, even decades later, reverberate across the globe.

The tanker, the Exxon Valdez, had just loaded more than a million barrels of Alaskan crude.

This was the economic philosophy of many Latin American nations during the 1960s and 70s.

Lured in by low-interest loans, they sought to fund ambitious infrastructure projects and modernize their nations.

Then the 1980s came and brought with it a perfect economic storm.

Global recessions, soaring interest rates, and plummeting oil prices.

Countries like Brazil and Mexico found themselves drowning in debt, unable to keep up with mounting interest payments.

After August of 82, pretty much all of Latin American countries defaulted.

Mexico announced to the world that it could no longer meet its debt obligations.

For Latin America, the 1980s was La Decada Perdida, or The Lost Decade.

Economies stagnated, unemployment skyrocketed, and widespread social unrest spread across

By 1986, U.S. local banks faced an existential crisis.

Originally, savings and loan banks specialized in long-term, fixed-rate mortgages.

Stability was everything, and stable interest rates made mortgages safe for both homeowners and banks.

A soaring inflation of the late 1970s changed everything.

As inflationary expectations have been worsened, business and other borrowers are also tempted to use credit to finance speculative ventures.

The Federal Reserve stepped in, hiking interest rates dramatically.

They were paying higher interest on new deposits, while stuck with low-yield, long-term loans.

Well, this administration's objective will be a healthy, vigorous, growing economy that provides equal opportunities for all Americans, with no barriers.

Without anyone looking over their shoulders, S&Ls ventured into the realm of high-risk investing without any expertise whatsoever.

We will not rest until the cheats and the chiselers and the charlatans spend a large chunk of their lives behind the bars of a federal prison.

By the mid-'90s, nearly a third of S&Ls collapsed.

American taxpayers had to shell out over $100 billion in bailouts.

Now we know what happens when you destroy financial regulation.

In the early 1980s, gay communities were struck by fear of a nameless disease.

The only thing I can liken it to is a war zone, but most of us have never lived in a war zone.

But it was, as you never knew where the bomb was going to drop.

Rumors spread of a gay cancer striking at the heart of the community.

The disease, which turned out to be HIV-AIDS, wasn't just ignored by world governments.

It was politicized to an appalling degree.

Last Friday, I started noticing difficulty swallowing, and it got progressively worse over the weekend to the point where I didn't want to eat.

Religious leaders and policymakers around the world dragged their feet.

In America, President Reagan stayed silent for years, letting the crisis explode.

By the time action was taken, millions were infected worldwide.

People who, because they had been diagnosed, suddenly disappeared.

The tide finally turned in 2003 with PEPFAR, an aid program that has saved over 25 million lives.

Ladies and gentlemen, seldom has history offered a greater opportunity to do so much for so many.

Soviet War in Afghanistan It's Christmas 1979, and Soviet tanks are rolling into Afghanistan.

The first Soviet invasion of a country outside the Eastern Bloc since World War II.

A communist superpower is hoping to prop up a faltering communist government in the face of overwhelming Islamic resistance.

What they found was a grueling, decade-long quagmire.

Soviet forces faced huge resistance from the Mujahideen.

Islamic rebels were bolstered by covert American support and supplies.

Tonight, the Russians accused the United States of preparing to give the rebels in Afghanistan massive supplies of arms and equipment.

The war drained USSR's coffers, sapped its morale, and was a significant contributing factor to their eventual collapse.

They refused to contribute to the country's rebuilding after more than a million civilians were killed.

They left a vacuum that would ultimately be filled by both the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

And the Taliban came marching along from Kandahar to city to city to city, saying, we're going to make the cities safe for you again.

Students have been the cornerstone of civil protests for centuries, espousing lofty ideals in search of justice and social change.

In the spring of 1989, however, thousands of Chinese students found only sorrow.

They flooded into Tiananmen Square, demanding political reform and personal freedom.

They turned Tiananmen Square, the country's symbol of sovereignty, into a hub of dissent and protest.

They staged peaceful protests for weeks as the world looked on, hopeful that it could spark a new Chinese revolution.

When June rolled in, those hopes were dashed.

The Chinese government sent in troops and tanks to quell the unrest.

The military massacred unarmed civilians, scattering or arresting survivors.

One man alone, of course, can't stop an army, except for a moment, that's exactly what happened here.

Thirty minutes in the middle of the day, an army was stopped by a man who stood still.

The official death toll is unknown, with estimates ranging from a few hundred to several thousand.

Thirty years on, it is still impossible to openly mark the anniversary in mainland China.

Vigils are held every year in Hong Kong, attended by tens of thousands.

The crackdown crushed any potential reform movement, ushering in decades of iron-fisted

Famines have occurred for all of human history.

The African famines, starting in the 1980s, are a different story.

Dawn, and as the sun breaks through the piercing chill of night on the plain outside Corum, it lights up a biblical famine.

They began with horrific droughts, exacerbated by governmental mismanagement.

Civil wars, corruption, and Cold War politics turned localized food shortages into mass starvation.

Ethiopia's 1983-85 famine was the worst, killing over a million people, by some estimates.

The most difficult thing that I can never forget in my life is that, to go into the camp and choose from, make a choice of those young children, lactating mothers, and elderly people.

For a while, local warlords and corrupt officials hoarded aid.

Somalia and Sudan faced similar tragedies, with famines lasting long into the next decade and beyond.

The global response was, and is still, slow and inadequate.

Even Live Aid's record-breaking charity concert failed to fix systemic issues.

The region is now trapped in a decades-long cycle of dependency, economic ruin, and mass death.

In the wee hours of March 24th, 1989, the Exxon Valdez oil tanker was steaming through the Prince William Sound.

Unfortunately, against company policy, only one officer was on the bridge.

Suddenly, it crashed into Bly Reef, tearing open its hull and releasing almost 11 million gallons of crude oil into the pristine Alaskan waters.

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10 Worst Decisions From the 1980s

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