Financial Crisis, Ideology, and Alienation

Abstract

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, people in the United States faced the worst financial disaster since the 1929 stock market crash and the 1930s Great Depression that followed it. Those years were hard times, with great fortunes lost for some, mass unemployment, soup lines, and grave uncertainty about the future. Rather than public utility companies failing as they did at the end of the 1920s, the fall 2008 stock market crash saw the collapse of huge privately owned lending and brokering corporations, including Indy Mac, Freddie Mac, Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, Citicorp, and American International Group (AIG). While blue chip giant CEOs were lobbying vigorously during the final months of the George W. Bush administration for massive government bailouts, myriad middle-class citizens who worked hard and planned for retirement lost their savings and security with repeated plunges in stock market values. Among the notoriously devastating days is September 29, 2008, on which approximately 1.2 trillion dollars vanished, with a dramatic Down Jones net loss, −777.68, the biggest negative net change in stock market history.