Yes, the knock-on effects on Regular Joe were terrible, because RJ was employed by the big, powerful investors. When they lost money, RJ got laid off.

This is probably a good point to mention that I do not believe austerity works to repair the economy; it works to enable the rich to buy up distressed assets for pennies on the dollar.

This is what's happening here in Argentina right now. The government is selling off the foreign reserves at great speed, nominally to satisfy the demand for dollars, thus keeping the exchange rate between the Argentine Peso and the US dollar stable. But the only people with the available capital to buy those dollars are the rich. Thus the net effect is a massive transfer of wealth from the national treasury to wealthy private individuals. The main theme of the Macri government is looting and sacking of the public treasury.

Of course this accompanied by the usual "privatization" of public assets, and we all know what that means. For more detail, you can see the article I wrote last week-
https://steemit.com/argentina/@redpossum/redpossum-mansplains-about-argentina