Economy woes follow 1980s fashion The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles swung onto our television screens, Salman Rushdie published Satanic Verses and farmers' favourite - the Barbour jacket - became inexplicably trendy for city dwellers. And then there were those Liverpool players, showing remarkable lyrical dexterity for a bunch of footballers, rapping how they had "won the league, bigger stars than Dallas, they got more silver than Buckingham Palace". Welcome to 1988 - the year where the UK charts were topped for five weeks by The Only Way Is Up - at a time when the UK economy was beginning to have other ideas. Economic growth had peaked and was beginning to slow, while inflation was rising - both precursors of the recession of the early 1990s. Heady days that seem an age away. Or do they? On Wednesday, the Bank of England governor hinted that the UK may be heading back towards those troubled times, saying the Britain faced its "most difficult economic challenge for two decades". The "two decades" comment was a good headline, but a bit misleading, says Richard Hunter of Hargreaves Lansdown stockbrokers. "What you have to remember is that the past ten years have been extremely successful economically. "But what the governor was trying to spell out - especially to younger people who can only really remember the good times - is that things are changing, as they inevitably had to." The late 80s saw "some pretty dire times", recalls Mr Hunter, who would not be drawn on whether he ever owned a Barbour jacket. "In 1986 you had the Big Bang, and then in 1987 there was the hurricane and the crash where the market fell off a cliff. So by 1988, the economy had got into a bit of trouble. "And between the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was a lot of negative equity and it took a long time for the market to recover its poise and confidence. "There were quite a few rounds of redundancies, especially in the City. Read more. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets (CSS) enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets (CSS) if you are able to do so.