Nation will 'reset' attitude, bounce back, author forecasts
— -- It came as no surprise to journalist and novelist Kurt Andersen that America's economic engine nearly pulled the rest of the global train off the rails in September 2008.
The country had been chugging along on a calamitous course since the Reagan years, oblivious to the danger ahead, Andersen asserts in Reset: How This Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America (Random House, $15, 96 pages). "Right around when Ronald Reagan became president and Wall Street's great modern bull market began, we Americans gave ourselves over to gambling (and winning)," he writes.
From the beginning of the 1980s to 2008, stock prices and home values climbed relentlessly. "Not coincidentally, it was during the same period that state-sanctioned and state-run gambling became ubiquitous in America," writes Andersen, author of Heyday and Turn of the Century.
Inevitably, the age of excess ended with the collapse of Lehman Bros. in September 2008, imperiling the global economy.
The thud heard round the world was the sound of America's housing industry crashing. Americans are paying the price for skipping down the subprime money trail as if rising home prices were our manifest destiny.
"We turned the United States into a winner-take-all casino economy, substituting the gambling hall for the factory floor as our governing metaphor," he writes. The gambling ended in a cascading global financial crisis.
But Andersen, a writer of historical fiction, is confident the nation will rebound stronger than ever. We've been here before, he says — in 1837, 1873, 1893 and 1932. All have unmistakable resonance today. Andersen reminds us that American history has exhibited a pendular theme, swinging between boom and bust economically, and right and left politically.
We've just finished living through a second Gilded Age, he says, in which rich Americans got richer and hyperconsumption became a national affliction.
Andersen is most illuminating when explaining the political cycles that give context to public policy and frame the decisions of presidents. He contends that the financial crisis brought an end to a long "greed-is-good cycle."
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